All your Base(boards) are belong to us

Sort of an old Meme, but a classic.

Anyway, we have been living without baseboard in the living room since before we moved in. The living room was originally carpeted, as you may recall, and when we removed the carpets to work on the hardwood, we took out the baseboards too, since they were about an inch off the new floor level. That is how things stayed for a year and a half, until after some reading and we were on our way!

Here is what it looked like for over a year and a half:
Pretty ugly, right? Notice the huge gap at the bottom of the wall.

Filling is an important part of trim work, at least when you cut wood like I do, and when your house is as warped as this one.

Here is pretty much what the finished product looks like, all clean and white and done!
As part of this project, I had to finish wiring our AV plugs behind the TV (shown three cat6, HDMI, two coax, five RCA, and one FireWire)

This project was also the first that young Master House assisted on. Here you see him moving a piece of baseboard used for measuring purposes.

The baseboard we are using is a solid pine, pre-primed from Home Depot. I think that they pre-prime it mostly to hide the crappiness of the wood. You can see the profile in the picture above. We painted it a nice gloss white, which should be easy to clean in the future. The board is sold in nice long lengths (18 feet), but that also makes it exciting to bring home:Anyway, this project is creeping along (we started in August!), held up various other projects and for a while by the lack of a safety key for the table saw. We have the living room and one side of the hallway done. Still have the entry and the kitchen to do, as well as the other side of the hallway.

Still, the living room is done! That counts for something right?

November

The month is half over already, and we have been busy! First, yes, this is a tomato flower, and in November! With the string of nearly 80 degree weather we have had, we may even get some more tomatoes.On Saturday I ripped out most of the garden, and planted some winter vegetables. We planted garlic, lettuce mix, beets, and snow peas, which were all the "winter" things we had. Still going strong are the tomatoes, sweet potato, and chives. We will see how they end up.

Other than garden work, and chasing around the offspring, we have been working on baseboards, and the tv/book storage solution. Expect more posts on those in the future! Anyone need a couple of old bookcases?

October Harvest

Feeling a little Shelfish

With the impending arrival of the addition to our family, we found it necessary to wind up our hobby room to create space for a nursery. As one of us (me) has an extraordinary amount of hobby material, this meant that we need to find some storage somewhere, something that could safely hold all the various materials and models. (mostly unbuilt models of course!)

Since I have an inordinate love of storing things in office boxes, we decided that a set of shelves designed to hold 15+ of these boxes would be ideal. Also, since we do few things by halves here at This Old Blog (should we finish a project at all of course), the shelves were built to be adjustable, hold far more weight than they would, and tied into the rafters and studs for extra support. We also planned to create a seat for changing shoes, and a space to store two large plastic tubs.

As always major construction was accomplished with the aid of my father, and minor work completed by me in the wee hours.

The shelves were built in a corner of the garage by the side door and the door to the house. This space was occupied at the time by a bizarre accumulation of closets built on closets, storing nothing but spiders a the time. Previously it appeared to be a broom, paint, and dust storage closet. This was ripped out, which was difficult, because like everything built by the previous owner in this house, it had about two nails per linear foot of board, sometimes more. All nails were three inches long or more, although the size varied from nail to nail. We ended up ripping the boards out, and removing the nails later when possible.

While we were doing all this, we also replaced the cardboard cladding of the garage corner in question, and drywalled, textured, and painted. Yes, I said cardboard. Some previous owner covered up the studs in the garage with fruit box cardboard. Some of that was subsequently covered with shelving material or drywall. A horrible mess. Removing all of that also exposed some minimal termite damage, which was photographed and scraped away.

After the drywall was installed, the surface textured, the supports tied into the frame of the garage, and the seat constructed, the shelf brackets were installed. Then shelves were cut to fit, supports added to the front edge of each to prevent bowing, the whole mess sanded and painted to match the garage walls.

Now, on with the pictures:

The previous closets on closets

What lies beneath


Drywall up

Putting shelves together

Pre painting and sanding with boxes to test placement

Final paint

Next time on this old blog: Fencing? Wiring? Nursery? Garden or trees? You will have to tune in to find out.

Before & After

I realized that I never did a follow up from this post. A few months ago I finally bought a mantel from craigslist. I had been looking for close to 6 months and finally found one that would have a pretty good fit, be easy to mount and not too expensive. Those were the three main things that were holding me up. Our box and surround are a weird size so hardly any of the mantels I found would work. The mantels that would work were mainly all super heavy concrete which we had no clue how to move let alone mount. Anyway my dad and I drove my round prego self to the middle of nowhere to pick it up. We tried haggling on the price a little but the guy wouldn't budge, I got it for $200, which is not a bad deal considering it is carved wood.

Before:


After:


Now the issue is that the surround is not as big as the mantel so you can see some brick. For now I may just paint the brick that it is still exposed black, but we want something more attractive. What I would like to do is have a hammered copper surround but I am not sure where to start on that search. There is also tile or just getting a bigger piece like the one that's there. Any advice from the peanut gallery?