Not-Secretive-At-All Banquette - Part 2

Two weeks have now passed, and I've managed to complete the next couple of steps for this project. Since I'm only able to work on this banquette when I'm not at work, it was hard to keep it hidden from L. Also, I'm really messy when I work and don't clean up at the day's end, so that's another reason...

Anywho, so this is the area that needed to be prepped:

First step was to remove the baseboard. The hardest part about that was cutting the wood where you wanted it to stop. Probably took me a good hour to saw through one section! Good news is, I now have amazing biceps and shoulder muscles in my right arm.

I made the dining room a bit of a disaster zone... And it will probably remain this way for the next couple of weeks. L doesn't seem to mind eating amongst a bunch of wood scraps, though, so perhaps I can get away with not cleaning up for even longer. Experiment in the making, perhaps? Graph of L's anger/frustration level vs. time, I think, would best represent this study. I'm excited. But I digress - that shall be another post on its own.

So, after two weeks, I got down the main frame of the banquette using a bunch of 2x4 lumber. The most challenging part of this task was transporting the 8 feet long pieces of wood home without a car. The first time, I pushed a couple of pieces home using a shopping cart. I vowed never to do that again. The second time, I brought along my bicycle cart and enlisted L's help, hoping to figure out some kind of balancing act on the cart. Luckily, a local artist saw L and I struggling with our five pieces and offered to drive them over to our house in her borrowed van. Thanks for the random act of kindness, local artist! The next couple of times, I had the pieces cut in half and transported them in my bicycle cart. I love my bicycle cart. And so now, we have what you see below. It's not perfect, but I'm hoping to figure out how to make it work well when it's all put together.

Let There Be Light

The light in the third bedroom of my house had issues. Sure, it turned on and off on cue, but that's about all that it had going for it. The light fixture is brass, the light switch is black, both have been in the house since the beginning of time, and both are caked with decades of wall paint because painter's tape was not a thing that any of the previous homeowners believed in, apparently. And there was this hippy-dippy-trippy bead string thing hanging beside the exposed bulb, one of the 'treasures' left behind by the previous occupant.



So, nearing the end of my third year in this house, I decided that it was finally time to tackle this light situation. That I was feeling motivated is the good news. The less good news is that I know less about electricity than just about any other subject. Obscure grammar rules? No prob. The lyrics of every Hanson song ever recorded? Know 'em all. Subway's daily sandwich special schedule? Yup. Live electrical wires? Uuuhhh...

Semi-surprise Banquette - Part 1

My wife, who will hopefully not read this blog for the next while even though she is technically a contributer, has decided that for presents, she wants all things house related. So, for her birthday this year, my plan is to build her a built in banquette in the dining room. I will be hiding the progress from her and only working on it in secret as much as I can. Since I'm bad about blogging about projects after completion, I've decided to blog about it as I go along.

First step: the plan. Liz gave me a sketch of what she wanted the bench to look like, which I then took apart in order to figure out how to put it together. Next step: buying the materials. Deadline: Five weeks from now.

 

Woodchips to the Rescue

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Both R and I fell in love with Texas Townhome mostly because of the yard. It’s perfect. The fences are just high enough to ensure a little bit of privacy (so that the neighbours wouldn’t, theoretically, judge you for being in your early thirties and hosting parties featuring trays full of jello shooters, if you did that sort of thing …) but not so high that you can’t make chit chat with said neighbours about their perfectly coiffed giant poodle or your whippet puppy (because this is Leslieville). It’s south facing, so we get lots of light, but a giant, beautiful tree ensures lots of shade. The half nearest the house is paved with big, gorgeous, flagstones, and the half out by he lane with lush, green, perfectly push-mower sized lawn. Our most wonderful baby, the dog, would love it, and we would be dog parent heroes.

a mud pit full of dead sod and worms

While we weren’t exactly wrong, by the time we took possession it was clear that half the yard was actually paved with big, gorgeous, flagstones while the other half was … a mud pit full of dead sod and worms. Clearly, the sellers had plopped down new sod for the showings and it hadn’t taken. (We’re not mad. The house itself is in great shape, and dead sod isn’t the worst thing I’ve encountered moving into a new place. At least there was nothing in a fish tank -NOT A FISH!- in the living room. True story).

mmmmmm...delicious

The dog did love it … because she loves to roll in mud and eat worms. The neighborhood raccoons (all eight hundred, approximately) seemed to agree. Every morning R and I, committed to learning this new skill called gardening, tried to re-attach the sod to the mud in the hopes that it would cease to be dead, and every evening the raccoons turned the squares of sod upside down again looking for worms. 

worm barfer

R and I considered pulling up the sod and putting down more flagstones, or raised bed planters, or river rock.  We might well return to those ideas (but not to R’s ideas of an apiary or chicken coop. Jello shots you can hide from the neighbours. Noisy fowl and hordes of bees, not so much). So soon after closing costs and the like, though, they weren’t realistic solutions right away, and, while we tarried, the dog continued to track mud in the house and throw up worms. 

wood chip wonderful

So what was the short term solution? Wood chips! We live super close to the neighborhood Home Depot and R bought a few affordable bags of wood chips there, shoveled the dead sod into yard waste bags, and covered over the mud and worms with the wood chips. It’s functional for now, and surprisingly aesthetically pleasing. And the whippet loves to role in them but doesn’t track them in the house and doesn’t eat them. Happy yard ending! Hooray!

 

Striking Stripes

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When it comes to decorating, I have really great ideas. Really! Luckily, I also have really great friends who gently take the paintbrush from my paint-covered hands (ok, paint-covered arms, all the way to the elbows) while I am up a ladder screaming at a ceiling that got paint on itself and in my hair ON PURPOSE and expertly execute the vision - which has miraculously been transformed into a plan (!) rooted in years of art school and other creative learning experiences (not mine).

This story begins months before that, though, on the day when R and I first walked into Texas Townhome and fell in love with the yard! the kitchen sky-lights! the three separate rooms so different from all the open-concept flips we’d been visiting! and forgave the McDonald’s-yellow entry way. But after a few months of desperately craving an Egg McMuffin every time we left the house something had to be done. And so I began spending hours on Apartment Therapy with a goal other than my usual one (to avoid all more pressing to-do’s). I needed entry way ideas.

R and I liked the idea of wallpapering the area in a colour and pattern that would contrast nicely with the deep blue we planned to paint the living room (as you can see in the photos from the talented Julie below, the entry way can be seen from the living room through a cut out in the wall). Our dreams were crushed when we visited the local paint store where the amiable sales staff (while feeding our dog a biscuit from the behind the counter! Gotta love Leslieville) informed us that most wallpaper costs between $75 and $100 a roll, and most rolls are sold in packs of two.  Having just bought a house, we hadn’t been planning on spending so much on the tiny entry way.

Which brings the story back to our amazing friends (who are also coincidentally our co-blog contributers!) I mentioned our wallpaper woes to our amazing friend who has a background in print-making, and she assured us that she could create a wallpaper style pattern on our wall using (much more affordable) paint! And she did!

See!
(photo credits to Julie, one half of the Designing Neighbours!)

The entry-way primed and ready to go.

Free hand taped by a Designing Neighbour (maybe we should consider a sitcom as well as a blog?)

The next step was to paint the blue in between the yellow tape. Then we let the blue paint dry a bit, but not completely, so that the paint didn't chip when we removed the paint.  So, when the blue paint was almost dry, we peeled back the yellow tape and voila! Project complete :) 

ta-da!

We love how the project turned out, and feel lucky to live near such generous and talented folk.

Project Silver Trinket

Silver Trinket is the name of the paint colour. The name is perhaps not as alluring as Balboa Mist, Timber Wolf, or Apparition, but aesthetically, Benjamin Moore's Silver Trinket was the most appealing shade of gray for our old teal laundry room that had seen far better days.

We've owned our house for two and a half years now. In that time, we've slowly but methodically undone the previous owner's 'special' paint choices. The bright orange main bedroom, now the colour of a sandy beach. The acid green basement and hallway, now powder blue and warm white. The stark white washroom, now adorned with olive accents. The blotchy navy garage door, now an even grass green. The floor-to-ceiling (including the ceiling) teal laundry room was the most recent project.

The laundry room hadn't exactly been on the reno plan for this year, but when the progressively deteriorating washer reached the point of no return immediately followed by the inevitable demise of the three-decades-old dryer, it seemed that the universe was offering a sign. I wouldn't feel right installing a brand new washer and dryer into the teal laundry room with its bashed up walls and lumpy ceiling. Redoing the stick-on-linoleum unfortunately wasn't in the budget, but a can of paint certainly was, and I know quite well by now the difference a good colour on the walls can make. The previous owner had in multiple places spackled holes and painted right over the spackle, skipping the part wherein one typically sands the spackle level with the drywall. The resultant rough patches of teal spanned the walls like a dalmatian's spots. There were inexplicable nails jutting from the door frames. There were splashes of paint across the water pipes. There was crusty green painter's tape disintegrating atop a windowsill, the former owner's abandoned attempt at a decent reno before she clearly exclaimed, "Screw it! Screw it all!" and handed the paint roller to her six-year-old.

Toilet, I challenge you to a dual (flush)!

Since our toilet has been ghost flushing for the past several months (due to an old flapper) and we had recently had our water meter installed, I thought to myself, now is a jolly good time to bring our one single toilet forward into the world of increased water efficiency!

We had two choices:
1) Replace our old 3.5 gpf toilet completely with a shiny new dual flush toilet. This would cost us 200-500 bones. Canadian! Or
2) Convert our current toilet into a dual flush using a kit. This would cost us $22 to $40.

We opted for choice 2. Mainly because it means less waste in our landfill, and also, it's cheaper! Once the decision was made, what did I do? I made it so.

After some research, I wanted to go with a dual flush kit made by one2flush. However, they seemed to be only available online. The only kit available locally was Hydroright over at both Home Depot and Canadian Tire. It had both good and bad reviews, but I decided our experience would be one of the good exceptions and took my chances with it. I purchased the one with a handle (instead of push buttons) at Canadian Tire for $21.99. Our toilet has the ballcock system, which sources said might interfere with the Hydroright, so I also purchased the Hydroclean ($15) to replace the ballcock fill valve. I was super excited about it because it came with a J-tube that basically circulates the water in your tank, keeping any debris to a minimum with each flush. And it helps save even more water by controlling how much goes into the bowl! Yowza!

Once said things were purchased, my exciting toilet adventure began.

Step 1) Pee. You never know if you're going to hit a snag and not be able to pee for an extended period of time.

Step 2) Shut off water, then flush toilet to empty tank. This is when I discovered that the inside of our tank is lined with Styrofoam, and our previous owners used one of those toxic blue drop in toilet cleaner thingies. With the tank empty, I cleaned it as best as I could, but the Styrofoam made this a bit difficult.


Step 3) Remove old fill valve and ballcock. At this point, I realized that the Hydroclean model I purchased would not fit, and I had to go out and purchase a different one. So I did.

Step 4) Eat lunch. I was hungry. I started watching some television while eating, and got caught up in it.

Step 5) After a few hours, I realized I had to pee again and thought it would be best to get back to toiletting. This is why step 1 is important.

Step 6) Install Hydroclean fill valve. The instructions are pretty straight forward, and the instructional video on their website helped even more, so this step was fairly easy.

Step 7) Remove flapper and handle. Also really easy to do by just looking at it.


Step 8) Install Hydroright. After watching the instructional video online, this, too, was quite easy to do. Badabing! Done!

Step 9) Put tank cover back on. This is where I discovered the inner lip of the cover hits the top of the Hydroclean and won't close properly, so I, unfortunately, had to remove the Hydroclean and put back the old fill valve and ballcock. Good news is, the Hydroright seems to still work with the ballcock. Badabing! Now I'm really done!


Step 10) Turn water back on. So, really, now I'm done. The ghost flushing issue seems to be resolved, and the dual flush systems seems to be working well so far! We'll see how well this plays out a few months from now. The chrome handle isn't as attractive as our old handle, but at least we're saving water.

With having to figure out what each part was and what the instructions meant, this whole process probably took me about an hour. But now that I kind of know the mechanisms of a toilet, if I had to do this again, I could probably do it in 15 minutes.