^they had done this weird decorative crap in a few places like that...
the weird angular white parts are actually raised pieces of trim, like an MDF. we ripped em all out, filled holes and sanded it all down.


there were similar things on a built in entertainment cabinet thing that we re-purposed... i think it came out well:

9/13/2010 8:03:46 PM

Just replaced all the leaky hardware inside one of the toilet tanks with a dual flush system. Pretty cool how it works, hopefully it will save some water too. Didn't even take an hour to finish though, so not sure if that qualifies for this thread

9/17/2010 3:03:48 PM

well... did you do it yourself?

9/17/2010 11:20:58 PM

Yep that's why I posted it here

9/18/2010 10:04:28 PM

Original bathroom floor

Bathroom after i painted it the first time





How it is today...

10/8/2010 2:03:38 PM

It looks like someone got their ass beat in that bathroom in the first picture.

10/8/2010 3:29:25 PM

OJ Simpson was a house guest.

10/8/2010 4:40:27 PM

you better hope the glove doesn't fit

10/8/2010 4:54:50 PM

http://ana-white.com/2009/11/plan-thomas-media-wall-base-unit-knock.html

really want to build this............anybody in the triangle have workshop space??

10/19/2010 2:31:32 AM

^ ncsu crafts center - join the woodshop there. I worked there for several years. You can join, and as an alumn, you'll get a discount. You can rent storage space, they have plenty of equipment. You can sign up for a project class so someone is there to guide, and in the past they've aways had someone (very experienced) there one night a week to give a advice. And they just renovated it last year.

It's definitely worth checking out if you have any interest in something like that. and it's a great little community. feel free to pm me if you have any questions about.

10/19/2010 7:57:45 PM

^ thats awesome!

my dad used to have a shop back in the dark ages

i wish i paid more attention when i was hanging out with him in the shop

building it myself would be soooooo much cheaper than paying retail markup

plus the satisfaction of saying......i totally built that!

thanks for the reply!

10/20/2010 2:05:21 AM

Got an estimate to rip out all floors in like half of our condo and have wood put in... but that means I now need to rip up that built in media center at the top of this page. Not looking forward to that mess (patching drywall, possibly re-texturing, and painting).

10/20/2010 4:44:03 PM

Started re-doing the floors of the other bathroom this weekend. Not bothering to document this one with pictures, but so far I've ripped out all the old carpet, pad, tack strip, baseboard... removed toilet... cut backerboard... installed it all.

Going to hopefully seal up the backerboard seams tonight and start cutting tile tomorrow.

11/1/2010 3:21:25 PM

^^ you going with solid hardwoods or engineered or what?

Not a hard project by any means but we are going to change the "neutral" paint color on the first floor of our house. We have the dining room and the reading room fully painted up as well as the kitchen and accent walls in the dining room. But the neutral walls that are left are this really light beige that they were when we moved in. It really isn't a good neutral color as it is too bland. We were just going to go with a darker beige to make the trim pop an dall, but based on the colors we have already painted downstairs, we are going to try a gray as the neutral color instead. Hopefully the results are positive

11/3/2010 1:16:28 PM

^i actually replied to you in the home ownership woes thread... but it's engineered hard wood.

i'll answer your other questions here though:
it's about 800 sq ft total
that includes 1.5 flights of stairs
we're ripping out the old carpet ourselves as well as moving all the furniture out.
living & dining rooms are currently tile and they're demoing all that.

the engineered wood is 5" wide and all 6' planks, at like $7.79/sq ft, which is probably on the high end for what most people want.

total estimate is like 12.6k, or about 13.2k after tax.

11/3/2010 4:40:01 PM

hahaha my bad. I didn't even think to check the usernames. fail

Thanks for the information though man.

11/3/2010 9:56:25 PM

To get ready for the wood flooring installers, my wife and I spent the weekend moving everything out of the living room, dining room, master bedroom and closet. Then pulled out all the carpet, tack strips, and baseboard.

I'm so sore and my fingers hurt.

11/8/2010 2:14:37 PM

anyone wall mounted a TV before? i'm planning to get a mount off monoprice and do it myself, then wall mount some speakers. i think i'm going to try to run all the wiring behind the walls.

11/24/2010 12:44:22 PM

^ I've hung a few. running the wiring is the only tough part. In my (fairly limited) experience, it's either really easy or a pain in the ass. It really just depends on where, how far, and what you have to run the wires through.

11/24/2010 6:09:59 PM

I've got a big tv equipment stand... I plan to purchase a receiver and some wall mount speakers and the tv mount.

So I want to run hdmi, power, and 2 speaker wires up from behind the stand to behind the tv (maybe 5ish feet. Pop the hdmi and power out behind the tv, and if possible run the speaker wires out to the sides and pop them out behind speakers.

Seems like I need to first mount the TV to see how much room I have for speakers, then I can start to figure out where holes need to go and what studs are between them.

11/25/2010 12:50:30 AM

Getting ready to start a nice DIY project in the next week or so. We have a 4' x 8' storage room next to our deck that shares the exterior wall with the house. I'm going to gut it and finish it out into a small home office so I have a place to work without the kids interrupting. I'll definitely post pictures here as it progresses.

11/25/2010 8:17:29 AM

^^ if you keep the wires in the same stud cavity it is really easy. get a low voltage quick box and the plate with the rectangle cut out of it from the audio/video section lowes.

11/25/2010 10:03:15 AM

what ^ said. If you go straight up and stay within in the same floor level (which is what you're doing), it's pretty damn easy. You shouldn't need to mount it first, you can figure everything out with a measuring tape, pencil and paper (or just mark on the wall). But I guess it wouldn't necessarily hurt either.

Setting it up that way will probably leave some wire showing at the bottom of the floor (going from the receive to stud cavities of the speakers). Depending on what is above or below that room, you can run it to the next floor and then down/up. That can be more complex, but I've run wire through crawl spaces and attics and it ends up looking really nice and clean. And it can be as easy as drilling a small hole into the floor - just depends on the floor plan.

11/25/2010 12:54:47 PM

my fiance and I recently bought a house that was nearing foreclosure and have been busy with lots of projects. This is probably the biggest improvement.

11/26/2010 10:07:26 AM

garage got totally fucked up when the ex-fiancee moved out, so I'm reorganizing it again. Or at least attempting to.

11/26/2010 2:50:43 PM

Am I the only one who finds it very strange that the following threads are on top of each other?

Post Your Do It Yourself project Here
The Pregnancy Thread
Kitchen Knives

Just saying, it does make one wonder about the end result.

11/26/2010 6:41:31 PM

^^^That looks fantastic. HUGE improvement.

11/26/2010 9:34:32 PM

yea that looks great with the hardwoods and all

I finished the door casing this weekend except for another coat of paint on everything for touchups etc. now that it's actually up. Not sure when I'll get a chance to do that but I will definitely post pictures when I do. I wish I had true "before" pictures with bad paint and no molding (I forgot to take any until we had already painted a lot of that area of the house) but the foyer looks worlds better now after casing in those two doorways.

11/29/2010 8:55:40 AM

^^,^ Thank you! Having hardwood under carpet is definitely something nice about old houses.

Question: Has anyone ever painted countertops? How well did it hold up? What did you use?

Ideally we will completely re-do them at some point in the next year or so (maybe concrete?) but I was looking for something to bridge the gap until then.

11/29/2010 10:19:18 AM

i need to start taking some pictures. i finished the wainscotting in the dining room, moved on of the 2 coat closets in entry to become a kitchen pantry on the other side of the wall, ran board and batten waiscotting in said entry, repainted master, dining room, and entry. 2 weeks i am pulling up the oak floors and putting in australian cypress floors that are left over from a remodel i have going. been a busy week here. being a builder makes all this less fun cause i do this every day.

to do list- build a cool bed for my daughter. i have seen some awesome pics i am considering copying.

11/30/2010 8:59:15 PM

^i wish I took more before pics with what my wife and I have done. We haven't done anything crazy so far...just a lot of trim work, painting, and furnishing but wow does it look better than when we bought it. Any of our friends that helped us move into this house this year have commented on how much better it looks.

One of my next project isn't so much a handyman type project as it is just something I have been wanting to do in our house: we are going to turn one of the bedrooms into a home gym. We already have a nice treadmill, a nice olympic bench w/ 295lb weight set, medicine balls, curling bar, an iron gym pull up bar, and various handweights. I am planning to pick up a Weider power tower (dips, leg lifts, and another pull up station) and a nice recumbent bike and we will be good to go. It isn't a huge room and won't be very open at all once all the equipment is up there, but I don't need a lot of room to maneuver while on a piece of equipment so we'll see.

I think I am going to want to pick up some impact flooring but hoping that will be cheap. After Christmas I am going to mount a 32" LCD we just got for free with our new mattress and I just purchased a Roku box for the wife for Christmas so we can stream Pandora and Netflix in the room while working out. We've been slowly collecting stuff and we're down to the point where the last few items we want would probably have a 6 month payback after canceling our gym membership and then we'd be saving money

12/21/2010 2:09:04 PM

It's not a huge project, but I installed a 32" flatscreen in my bedroom today and wired up an electrical outlet behind it to hide all wires. Also went ahead and ran cat5e cable to the outlet as well in case I decide to wire the rest of my house at some point.

Installed my Roku HD (this thing is TINY) to the back of the flatscreen with velcro. It fit perfectly between the two rails for the wall-mount.

Fired it up and was streaming Netflix to my TV about 4 minutes later.

12/22/2010 1:18:07 AM

Awesome. That's exactly what I plan to do in the exercise room in January. I didn't realize the box was that small/light. I was going to put up a shelf when I mounted the tv but I would prefer to have nothing sticking off the wall beyond the TV in that room. What mount did you use? And, I have some extra velcro laying around from guitar pedals so I bet that would work pretty well...good idea!

12/22/2010 8:15:39 AM

^^how hard/involved was it to wire the outlet?

12/22/2010 8:32:26 AM

I used a Rocketfish mount from Best Buy. I really like it because it's about as low profile as you can get. I order a lot of flatscreens and wallmounts in my job at work, and these are pretty solid little mounts for the price.

As for the Roku, it's very small and retarded lightweight. It's basically a 5"x5" square, and 1 inch tall. Probably only weighs a few ounces.




The wiring was most definitely the hardest part of it all. It's not necessarily difficult, but depending on where you want to mount the outlet, it can get pretty tricky up in the attic trying to drill a hole throught the topplate of the wall to fish the wire straight down to your mounting location.

I had a crossbrace between my studs about 16 inches down that I had to go buy a special drillbit to drill through...like this:



Then, I was able to fish the wire down the wall, cut the hole for the electrical outlet and wired everything up.

Up in the attic, I was able to splice my outlet into an existing power wire using these little junction boxes...to be up to code, you have to make any connections inside these boxes and put a cover on it.



Luckily, everything worked on the first go-round. I'm no stranger to electrical wiring, but this was my first time doing this in a house (A/C electricity).

12/22/2010 11:40:09 AM

I'm way behind in getting pictures of all the stuff we have done around the house, but this weekend we finally got the chair rail cut and hung in the library/reading room and the dining room. Those two rooms looked so much nicer instantly with the paint we had in them + the chair rail; definitely glad we chose to put the chair rail up.

It was all inside corners and we are painting it white so it was really easy to get the cuts to lineup and use a little caulk+wood filler to fill the small gaps left on some of the cuts. The hardest part was where one of the walls bulged out a little bit in the reading room. It's one of those things where you would never notice the wall is bowed just slightly in one spot under normal conditions (we never did painting and decorating that room and living here for 9 months), but it is bowed just enough that it was kind of a pita to get the chair rail flush in that area. Several 2.5" finishing nails + liquid nails did the trick though

1/3/2011 9:31:23 AM

No pics yet, but swapping out an ugly ass white ceramic kitchen sink for a stainless one has been a huge pain in the ass because the dickholes who custom built our house put the kitchen sink over a 30" cabinet instead of a 36". The ceramic lip is perfectly flat and could just drop right in and be held in place with silicone, but the damn stainless ones aren't perfectly flat and I have no way to tighten it to the counter top thanks to the runt cabinet. So, I rigged it with lots of caulk and I'm hoping it's good enough but fearing it isn't.

Bleh.

1/9/2011 7:58:05 PM

again, not a home improvement project but I just finished this for a nursing home (it'll look better after the snow melts) we have a permeable patio (water runs through, though here it is pumped out because it's a courtyard) and a PVC arbor w/ lights. This was a JOB let me tell you, everything had to come through the nursing home... we're talking about 85 tons of material all wheelbarrowed/ and i bought a new pallet jack that just for these two courtyards. anyways here a photo or 3

1/12/2011 8:26:21 PM

Well, as long as we're posting things you make at work I can show you this map of race in Chicago that I made.

1/13/2011 10:29:23 AM

Question about trimming out 3 windows in our living room.

I'll start with a little background. I think I explained before that the house we bought had a good layout but was just missing all the bells and whistles on the finishes. No trim save the baseboard and trim casing only on the doors where there was actually a door hung. No crown moulding, no trim on other doorways/archways, and no trim on any windows. This presented a great opportunity for me to learn how to do this and to "personalize" our home.

I still need to take good "after" pics to show what we have been doing but I will post 1 "during" pic that was taken with my phone to show you what we did with two doorways in our foyer that were just wrapped with drywall:

We cut, hung, and painted all of this ourselves (never did any trim work before). This picture was after it was hung and primed but before it was fully painted:



We went with a slightly different built-up style than the traditional mitre-cut milled door casing since the openings were so big (9' wide x 7' tall - standard cookie-cutter door casing would have looked too small on that opening). For consistency, any of the smaller 3x7 doorways without a door hung we are going to just trim with the same moulding profile that is around the doorways with doors. We figured these big ones could be trimmed differently.

Anyway, now we are on to figuring out how to trim our windows. The first one up is going to be the windows in our living room.

We have 3 adjacent windows behind the couch that share one sill and apron without any other trim present (once again the casing is just wrapped with drywall). The 2 gaps between the windows measure 5 3/4" and the gap on the two outside windows to the edge of the sill is only 3 3/4"

I am assuming that these gaps were left so that someone could come back in and trim each window with cookie-cutter 2.25" milled casing around each individual window, but I am not a big fan of that since they would all be sharing the same sill and apron; I think it would look a little funky. If they had their own sill and apron each I would just trim each with a normal milled profile.

I am considering going with the "craftsman" style trim we used on the doorway picture above. However, because of the spacing of the windows, this would require me going with ~5" boards vertically between the windows and 3.5" boards vertically on the outermost edges and I am wondering if this would look weird.

It would end up looking something SORT OF like this (as far as the bigger gap between the inner windows):



except that:

1) there actually is an apron
2) the top wouldn't just be a flat board, it would be the flat board + the extra trim edging out the top for more flare (like in the picture of the other doorway we did)

Any thoughts?

1/13/2011 11:06:24 AM

^^neat map where all my asians at? no chinese restaurants?
^cool windows

1/13/2011 5:01:55 PM

Ok, related to my window trim options, I have a question about lumber.

I would prefer to get boards that are 1x3.5 and 1x5 to trim out my windows instead of the 1x4s and 1x6s I used for the doorways (similar ratios but on a smaller scale for the windows so it doesn't look as bulky)

What is my best bet for getting boards in these dimensions? Is this something that a local lumberyard would carry or would I have to get the 1x4s and 1x6s from Home Depot/Lowes/Other hardware store with limited dimensions and then try to rip them with a table saw?

1/13/2011 8:41:18 PM

Easier and cheaper to buy from somewhere and rip them yourself, I would think.

I've never had a need to go to a lumber yard and ask for a specific width other than standards.

1/14/2011 11:38:40 AM

You're probably right; I've just never done it before. I guess it's a good time to learn then

1/14/2011 11:49:15 AM

We had to build a new entertainment center to protect all our "toys" from our 1 year-old.
We added 2 sets of double roller catches to keep Tessa out. We also painted the whole living room because we were never fans of the color the sellers has chosen. Yes, it's bright. We're a bit unconventional.

The subwoofer is behind the TV. The gaming consoles and sound system (and all the games seen in the upper right of the "before" photo) are in the cabinet. The DVR and front speakers were moved to a floating shelf above the TV.

1/16/2011 9:58:13 PM

nice job. i'm not a huge fan of the blue though - not b/c it's bright...it's just a little too close to that blue

1/17/2011 9:59:55 AM

Unique choice of wall color for sure Not one I'd pick for my own house but it looks nice; just a differing of tastes

Definitely looks better and more "finished" than before. I always like the two toned walls with chair rail in a room; we did that in two rooms in our house. Great job!

We actually just mounted our TV and hung shelves to hide cords and things this weekend ourselves. I'm terrible about remembering to take before pictures, but basically we always had the TV sitting on just an ugly, free black composite stand with glass doors on the front. The back panels got broken in the move so you could see the cords through the back because of the glass doors and it just looked crappy to me, plus it was taking up floor space and I'm big about taking up as little floor space as possible. It really opened up our living room by getting the TV stand/entertainment center off the floor. Looks much "cleaner" I think. I think I am going to try and paint the return air grille the same color as the wall now. We'll see.

Picture is just uploaded from my phone so not great quality:



That TV only has 2 HDMI hookups in the back so I got both of those filled and run down to the two shelves. One we have our PS3 on and the other is our HD cable receiver (soon to be replaced by the HD satellite receiver...which better have HDMI out...I don't feel like having to take the TV down to hook up anything else). Switchable power strip is sitting behind the receiver. I need to paint or wrap the gray power TV cord that kind of is an eye-distraction.

1/17/2011 10:06:37 AM

Quote :

"nice job. i'm not a huge fan of the blue though - not b/c it's bright...it's just a little too close to that blue"

No worries, it's actually much more green than blue (camera are deceiving). I wanted a light blue-teal, but this mint green-teal is what I got. We may eventually repaint with a calmer color, but what the heck! We're also going to replace the carpet with cherry-color wood later in the year, so the colors may balance out more when the floor is darker.

1/17/2011 10:53:21 AM

we painted the nursery this past weekend, so there really isn't much to see other than the walls being a different color.

the next project is taking my childhood bedroom suite that my grandfather built and refinishing it so my son can use it as his "big boy bed" (25 years of child use really puts wear and tear on furniture). I will be sure to photo document the refinishing.

1/17/2011 11:19:52 AM

Refinishing old family furniture for your kids is always exciting. :-D

1/17/2011 12:26:22 PM