Lately, I’ve spent a lot of boring time painting (though Jocelyn has helped me a lot with painting), cutting, installing, and wood filling trim (and still have some more to go). I’ve been coming to the conclusion that I am not a fan of finishing work.
I’ve been borrowing Jocelyn’s dad’s mitre saw almost since I started this project, but I’ve used it so much that I decided it was time to buy my own.
I put laminate flooring in the laundry and bathrooms, because it’s relatively inexpensive and easy to maintain. Though I’ve never installed it before, it’s pretty straight-forward (and as such, I didn’t take very many pictures, I’m realizing now).
I put a basic foam underlay in first. Even though this is a basement, I already have a sub-floor that acts as a vapour/moisture-barrier, so I didn’t need the fancier (and more expensive) underlay that also does those jobs.
I used circular vents for the ceilings, simply because I thought they were nicer looking than the square floor-style vents mounted upside down. There are two 5″ vents in the main room, one 5″ vent in the laundry room, and a smaller 3″ vent in the bathroom. For all but the bathroom, I just used the previously existing vent lines, but cut them shorter and used 5″ flexible duct to connect them to the vent in the ceiling tiles.
Continuing to move along, with painting complete, suspended ceiling finished, and lights installed. Still need to make a couple touchups on paint in some spots where the tape pulled it off, and a couple dings I made moving things around. It’s hard to tell from the pictures, the main area is painted dark grayish-brown (though it took Joce a good week or two to acknowledge it even had brown in it, to me that was the first color I saw.
Now that the drywall is finished, I installed the window sills. I’m just using 1×8 pine board, trimmed to size on a table saw. I’ll later add trim around the outside. I ended up deciding that it was worth finally buying a brad nailer (and hey, I needed a compressor anyways) – definitely ranks up there among my most fun-to-use tools. It made quick work of putting the sills in place.
Okay, so I’ve been a bit lazy with the blog lately. Things have only been happening in the last few weeks though, but I’ll make posts to work through it all. I finished putting the rest of the drywall up (which I started in April, wow..). Nothing special, a bunch of cutting and screwing involved..
After this, I started taping, with the help of my Dad. Now, this is where the big delay comes in, and why not a lot was accomplished since April.
With the help of my friend Matt, I finally started getting the drywall up. It’s a nice change, things are actually starting to look like real rooms now, instead of just framing, wood and wires everywhere.
I haven’t done a lot of drywall (a couple of wall sections, and more recently the headers for the upstairs closets), but I think we did pretty well. There were some complicated cuts to do.
It’s been a while since I posted, partly because I haven’t gotten a lot done in the last few weeks until just recently. I did get all the media wiring installed, however.
I’ll be mounting an LCD TV to the wall, and so I put in a recessed media box to hold all the cables. There’s also a 110v plug inside this box.
I really like the idea behind this (as opposed to putting keystone jacks behind the TV) since it means one less connection for all the wires, the excess wires tuck inside the box, and it’s easy to add to later.
A bit of an offside from my usual topics, but Rick Mercer gave an absolutely great explanation of how Canadian government and parliament works that is worthwhile watching.
I took advantage of some nice weather a couple weeks ago to finally replace the back (laundry room) window. I replaced the front windows a couple of months ago. The back window was 40″ x 24″, and had a slider on the outside, with a hinged flip-up window on the inside.
One issue I had was that the top of the window was actually above the gas and water lines, so once I added a ceiling to the laundry room, the window would have been above it.