florplan

Saarinen Dining Table

2009-09-10T08:32:00.000-07:00

Many of you are aware that we bought a new dining table as a result of redoing our floors. We went with the Eero Saarinen dining table with marble top. This table required white glove delivery which is a $400 service, don't freak out we got free delivery. When the delivery guys showed up I greeted them and they didn't have their white gloves on yet, no biggie they were in the truck right? Wrong they installed the whole thing in about two minutes and i didn't see any white gloves. The table is amazing in the room and fits just right. It seems small but that is because the finish is so well done that it reflects everything perfectly making the table disappear in the space. The first picture shows this really well, "where did the table go"! We do not have dining chairs yet but we do know what we want, they just need to go on sale again. Enjoy, we do!

*yes these are the new floors, better pics to come as soon as we can see it again!! *
** stay tuned for kitchen updates soon, tiles are in and the cabinets will be installed soon**

New Floors... Check!

2009-07-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

The story is this... we ordered a table for our dining room about 10 weeks ago. We bought new flooring about a month and a half ago. We demolished the old floors to make room for the new floors. We thought we had plenty of time until the CALL! The company that was delivering our table was about two weeks earlier then we anticipated. We were able to stall them a little but they finally told us they had to deliver the table. This put our floor installation into high gear. I all ready had the floor torn up and the sub floor replaced so I just had to put down the new stuff. Sounds easy right? Well it wasn't too bad if you don't count the problems with starting the floor, the kinks when you get to vents, the fact that we have a round dining room, and a small coat closet. Other than those few things the floor went in pretty smooth and there are only a few places i wish i had a little more time to rework things.

Here is the finished floor in the raw. Not too bad huh. The room felt so different that at first i wasn't sure i liked it, but it is starting to grow on me and i think it looks great.

"Operation Baby's Room"

2009-06-22T10:46:00.000-07:00

We bought new hardwood flooring for the living room a few weeks ago. This saturday I decided was time to begin tearing up the old floor. Many people who have visited our home have questioned the need to do this, as the floors didn't look that bad despite the color and some large black stains. Well little did they know that while the floors on top were ok it was what was under them that scared us. Take a look:
Doesn't look so bad huh! I think these will stay.

Hmmmm, doesn't look like these are going to stay, as a matter of fact i know the subflooring here is completely coming out. This is the trouble area in the room. Since we moved in our dining room has had "soft" spots that scared visitors and Randi. Something about falling through... blah blah blah. So i wouldn't fall through i had a piece of plywood i would sit on.

This room is unique as half of it is technically out side the foundation of the house. I am standing on the load bearing wall of the basement here, tricky footing.

And finally the surprise... tah dah!!! Here is where the baby will stay. We think this is a perfect location, and we get to keep the guest bedroom for guest... come one come all! This room is located next to the kitchen so we can just throw scarps down to the baby. also because it is fully contained their is no way of escape. finally the dirt floor we think will help us save money on diapers... poop all you want its dirt! * For those that don't know me i am kidding... Randi is actually moving down here.

And here is the dining room without a subfloor. I think the value of the house just tripled, we are getting good at this renovation thing. Stay tuned more to come in the following weeks.

"Built In" Phase 2

2009-06-17T08:21:00.001-07:00

The shelf looks nice with just one coat of primer. Randi worked really hard last night and made good progress. It blends with the wall real nice and you almost don't realize it is there. We will be doing a semi-gloss white as the paint color so it will "pop' a little with the light. The walls will eventually be painted a light grey almost white so there will be a little contrast between the shelf and wall.

"Built In"

2009-06-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

Well a simple saturday project has finally come to an end. We were only suppose to clean up and repaint the old built in book shelf making the project short and only to take on saturday. Turns out it didn't want to cooperate and we ended up tearing it out and had a huge hole in the wall for about two months now. slowly we did a little here and there and finally being tired of the mess finished building a new book shelf. we are excited and ready to get all of our books off the floor. Randi is in the process of painting it.

The idea is that the book shelf be a continuation of the wall. We borrowed a planer and created a 1 1/2" boarder with 3/4" shelves that are all flush. It is really clean due to the shleves being placed into a dato. Let's see if Randi can make it nice with a little paint.

Green Thumb

2009-05-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

We have finished yet another project on the long list of things to do. Our garden is planted and ready to produce some nice vegetables. Lets hope sun can reach into the depths of our backyard. We planted strawberries, celery, zucchini, onion, peppers, beans, and tomatoes. We ran out of room in our planters so no carrots or potatoes. Maybe we can get those next year. We will test our green thumbs in the persuit of not having to buy vegetables. Lets hope it works.

GRASS, and not the kind you smoke, well i guess you could

2009-05-12T06:48:00.000-07:00

So we planted some grass seed about a month ago. The interesting thing is we live under five of the biggest trees you have ever seen. We are not talking redwoods but these things are huge. While we love our trees they do cause a slight problem. Our house lives in shade for half of the year and nothing really grows in the shade. We bought some shady grass seed hoping that it would grow and it did. It is not as thick as we would like but i think that will just take some time. Randi also mowed it last night which was her first time ever mowing, and it looks really good. So I present to you our grass.

Planter 1

2009-04-15T05:47:00.000-07:00

Here is the latest project. This simple wooden box will soon become our new vegetable garden. I was able to complete the first of two planter boxes last night. We grill a lot in the summer and vegetables are one of our favorites to grill but we hate going to the grocery store for them. With any luck we should be successful. The planter is simple, made from cedar boards and aluminum corners with carriage bolts. Stay tuned for what they look like in the yard.

Additional Images

2009-02-07T15:01:00.000-08:00

I was able to upload some additional images of our sun room. I understand that this might be old news but we are still very excited and thought people might like to see some more images. Our TV (which will get hung on the wall and the stand sold in case anyone was wondering why such an eyesore is in the room, also something will go back under the TV and be a lot nicer looking) is in these photos and better images of the glass block that we re-grouted. Enjoy.

There are 5 can lights in the room which we thought were awful looking. We went out an priced new ones but decided to save a little money and hang onto them for the time being. In the process of painting the ceiling i got paint on them. Unfortunately or maybe fortunately I didn't wipe the paint off right away (I did not realize i had done this). Well one can not leave paint where paint is not wanted so I proceeded to clean it off. A little steel wool, razor blade and some elbow grease and we have shiny new looking lights. We really like them now and have decided to keep them (saves us a lot of money). So here they are all sparkly.

A little bit of blue tape still on the walls this was taken before final completion. I think it shows the grout work we did really well.

THE END... well kinda

2009-02-02T11:23:00.001-08:00

Saturday the 31st of January had to be one of our busiest days since starting our latest project. We worked a solid 13 hours without stopping (except for lunch) just to be able to share some photos to our fanatical readers... yes this means you can stop calling asking if we are done and if we can send you pictures. Actually, we really didn't do it for that reason we did it because we received our new sectional that we were anxious to sit on and see if it worked well in the room.

The CALL:
Me: Hello
C&B: Yes Mr. Cochran we will be delivering your new couch on Saturday between 8-11 in the morning will someone be there.
Me: Yes that will work.

The Delivery: 7AM
Randi: What is that noise are they here?
Me: No, it is only 7am and we still have painting to do.
Randi: Are you sure about that I think a big truck is out front.
Me: *looks up from bed* Uh... yeah they are here
Driver: Sorry we are here so early there was no traffic.
Me to myself: Dude it is 7am on sat morning... it could be anytime on saturday and there would be no traffic...
Me to driver: YAWN!! come on in

And here is the result of a month of waiting... too much money and not enough time... I present to you two lovely pieces of furniture that we won't sit on for 13 more hours (we at least unwrapped them 12 hours later)!!
Saturday.. all day: we had a lot of work a head of us before we wanted to open our new furniture. We are grateful that the floors are done and we didn't have to worry about them on delivery day but we still had trim to paint and install. With a lovely early wake up call we got right to work. We painted like crazy and I cut and installed the remaining baseboards. By the way for those that read the last post about Randi not really helping a whole lot when it comes to projects... well we should give her a big round of applause because she did pretty much all the trim painting, the first coat of green, and what she calls construction management.. I prefer the term yelling at me to do what she wants. She was a really big help and without her this project would look like our laundry room (more on that later) thanks Randi. So without any more intro i introduce our new sunroom... we are still in awe over how awesome it looks and feels. Enjoy and please feel free to comment we enjoy them.

Oh yeah she vacuums really well too.

A Reminder, Some Fun, Renting BIG Tools

2009-02-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

To remind people of where our current project started i dug up some photos from the first day in our home. We did a pretty serious deep clean and as you can see not a lot of improvement.

In the sunroom was some glass block that fills in a corner. They were nasty and dingy, someone tried to paint the mortar and well we didn't like the glass block very much. We thought of replacing them but when we priced out new glass block we were shocked to learn they are about $10 a piece and only go up from there. We talked about replacing them with something else or taking it out all together but figured that it would kill some of the character of the home so we left them. This last week after doing some work we decided we were tired of ugly glass block and we bought some grout and well they look great... almost new! Check it out.

In the midst of all our craziness i was able to get out and go snowboarding for the first time this season. It was a blast and it made me want to do it more... which i will.

After the fun was over I had to get back to work. We repainted the ceiling and on wednesday rented this bad boy. We almost paid someone to professionally sand our floors but decided i was just as capable as someone who has way more experience and actually knows what he his doing. We probably saved a ton of money and i got to use a BIG tool... go me! I would recommend renting, this thing was easy to operate and i didn't mess up the floors.
Check back soon as the final results will be posted on Monday.

Continuation of a MESS...

2009-01-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

so here we go part 2 of 2. This is only me third attempt to finish this post. Blogger has not been nice to me lately, but here goes.

DAY 3:

So day 3 started pretty good some minor demolition which only took a few hours and I could start laying the new sub-floor. I was getting excited as my body was tired and my lungs full of dust, to get on with laying the new floor. My neighbor taped on my window and in talking with her learned she needed to borrow a ladder. I own a ladder but it is not safe for any person to be on esp. an older lady, so i decided i would go she what she was trying to do. As I was leaving the house I fell through the floor. Now it is a good thing only a leg went through cause it is a far fall to the ground and under this floor lives busted up concrete and rocks and other things that probably bite. When I stopped myself falling any further I found one leg missing and the other top side. Now I am not the most flexible guy in the world so one would think OUCH... but in reality I was more disappointed in the fact the what I was hoping to be good sub-floor was needing fixing as well. I did end up not letting my neighbor lady borrow my ladder as she would have definitely hurt herself. It was even too sketchy for me to use my ladder to help her out so I let it be.

DAY 4:

If I am working on the house it usually begins like this:

Randi: Hey we need to work on this!!

Justin: OK let me get what we need

Randi: ... silence... type... type... type

Justin: 8 hrs latter tired and job done finds Randi either sleeping, playing, or on the internet

I think she should just say "you" have house stuff to work on cause that is about the only one that does work. But this blog is not to bash the wife cause I have picture proof that yes Randi is capable of helping with house stuff. Here she is with a really big pneumatic framing nailer. I am talking two hands and a tie down to use this thing and I was the one that thought she should use it... it was a long day. So after showing her how to use it and giving her the safety glasses... again long day, I prolly stopped worrying about my eyes, she went to town. One of the nice things about a pneumatic nailer is, little work, or in Randi's case double work. For some reason when I use the gun one nail comes out and when she uses the gun two nails come out. I feel really sorry for the sucker that has to pull that floor up. It is definitely not moving. But I can't complain cause she did a great job. This day was mostly laying the new OSB flooring which went rather well. The only drag here was that it snowed so I couldn't put the wood outside. I had to move everything around the room as I went so the day was a little long but non the less completed the task and was ready for real floors.

DAY 5:

This was suppose to be day 2 in the process but day 5 is better than day 6 or 7 or 8 well you get the idea. With this being Friday after the New Years Randi was back at work and I was by myself. Read day 4 again if you think this bothered me. I started my day by making a trip to the Home Depot to rent a tongue and groove nailer and pick up one piece of OSB to finish the sub-floor. I came home and was able to begin the FINAL floor. I was a little nervous as i didn't feel like screwing up some nice wood but i dove in and had a rather easy time. Our boards are 8" wide and normally they are 3" wide so the first few boards you are nailing by hand. I was able to use the T&G nailer from the first board. I was excited and before I knew it, I had 4 rows done. Randi was bored at work so she was coming home early to help... again day 4 post. She got home and I was a little nervous. Randi some times can let the littlest thing get to her or let it pass and I wasn't sure I was picking the right pieces of wood or the joints were tight enough... but needless to say she was pleased with what she saw and again offered to help. We continued and I put her on quality control so I could focus on getting the floor down. we worked till about 4pm and had every thing done.

DAY 5 CONT...

After cleaning up the mess and putting all the tools away this is the final floor in the raw. We like it and think we did a great job for first timers at wood flooring. We learned the 8" planks are the way to go. they require about 2/3 the amount of work as the 3" stuff and require very little nails. The guy at the Depot said i needed 2 boxes of nails... 2000 nails... but i only used 1/2 a box. I didn't skimp either. For those that do not know we are going to do a white pickling on them and will be making the trim white. We bought a new couch that will be very comfy for those that visit, and feel that this will be a well used room. Let us know what you think as this is the end of the story. If you like it give us props if not who cares nobody asked.

A MESS... that has a happy ending

2009-01-05T16:23:00.000-08:00

As many of you who have read this blog recently have seen we bought some new wood floors. We decided that the previous owner must have been blind when they picked the color of the laminate faux wood they installed. We also felt that of all the rooms in our house, this one would probably be the best pick to try something a little different. We purchased 8" eastern white pine flooring. Well here is our story of installing for the first time in my life real wood floors or any kind of flooring for that matter. This might be a long post so bear with me, i guarantee at least one laugh.

DAY 1:

Removal of old flooring was a breeze. it came up in all of about 20 minutes with no problems. You can see from the photo how not so nice the color is. The rest of the downstairs is a dark brown so why red was picked is beyond me.

DAY 1 CONTINUED:

As with the previous floor these laminate glue down tiles came up pretty easily. The removal involved tools so it took probably 1 hour to remove... some might argue that bigger tools would have reduced time but i am not so sure.

DAY 1 STILL CONTINUED:

Thinking that removing the tiles would give us a nice solid subfloor we were soon shown that old homes probably do not have solid anything. Whoever laid the previous floor decided that they would build a subfloor with 1" x 2" wood sticks that were rotted out with a layer of OSB and Plywood mix... 90% of which was also rotted out. This was the most time consuming part of my day. I could not pull up the pieces of plywood as all they would do is crumble. I had to cut between the studs with a circular saw and then pry up everything else connected to the floor. This portion of the job did not get completed on day one.

DAY 2:

More demo was required as the task was too time consuming for one day. We ended up borrowing a truck and buying 7 sheets of OSB to re-lay as sub-floor. Little did we know that what we thought was sub-flooring was not. It took all of day two to continue to demo the sub-floor. I soon realized that day 2 was soon gone and i still had more demo to do on day 3 as well as another trip to the hardware store for another round of OSB.

More to come of this crazy event so stay tuned... blogger is acting up so i am going to try another post.

New wood floors

2008-12-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

We got our new pine wood floors delivered today and we can't wait to install them in the sunroom. We plan to do this after we get back from the holidays. So you will just have to wait and see what the room will look like with the green paint, white trim and white floors. I hope it all goes well.

Happy Camper

2008-12-14T18:46:00.000-08:00

Justin and I are happy campers now that we have chosen a paint color for the sunroom. I'm just glad the paint selection process is over. After looking at thousands of colors provided by Justin's work I found this color in about 5 minutes at Home Depot. Vote to let us know if you like or dislike it.

Boiler Removal

2008-10-29T19:01:00.000-07:00

we were so excited to buy a house that we volunteered to remove the old boiler from the basement of our house. this one might think would be an easy task after all it was only about 4'x3'x5'... not that big. so one day while brig was in town i suggested we take it out of the basement. this stupid idea started the feat of removing the beast from the basement. we started small thinking we could just break it up but that didn't work out too well. we then started to see bolts and were excited thinking if we remove the bolts it would come apart and we would be done in an hour or so. well if the bolts came out as planned we wouldn't have spent 7 hours removing the boiler. turns out we had to cut most of the bolts in half and then pry them out of their holes hoping they would give. once we discovered the method of removing the boiler things sped up. we estimate that the boiler is about 1000 pounds of cast iron. we had it disassembled but now we had to remove it. being the nice brother that i am and tired of listening to brig complain about a broken finger nail, i picked the boiler up and took it out in one piece. i probably saved us another 10 hours of work. after a dirty 7 hours of work and a nice shower, we thought it would be nice to take brig out for dinner to thank him. unfortunately we ended up at a place that cooked the hamburgers way to long but in the end i think the day was really productive. thanks for the help brig and for future reference guest are welcomed anytime... the next task is the oil tank!!

Lakeview Terrace

2008-10-10T15:17:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are curious Samuel L. Jackson doesn't live next door to us.

washer and dryer

2008-10-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

this week marked a highlight in our home renovations. we have (after many months maybe even years of relentless discussion of what kind of apparatus to wash and dry our clothes with) have finally purchased a new washer and dryer. we went with the LG brand, front loading, high efficiency WM2016CW and DLE2516W models. For the lay person that is the model number for cheap and basic. we (as blogged about on this very blog site) have been creating a laundry room in which to house the WM2016CW and DLE2516W, This room is located on the second floor of our house and through research have learned that belt driven washers do not work very well for upstairs applications. The LG models have a drive shaft meaning no belts drive the washer. These are better for upstairs applications so we were sold... price and style did also influence our choice. So we now are the proud owners of a washer and a dryer in which we can now not only wash our unmentionables but yes we can dry them... hip hip hooray!! one note too mention the floor in the room may need to be changed as LG claims slight vibrations may be a problem... "If the floor is not solid, your washer will vibrate. You will hear and feel the vibration throughout you house." We are giving it time before we pour a concrete second floor in the house.

demo

2008-09-26T20:36:00.000-07:00

we had fun one saturday cleaning out the garage. one of our projects was to take apart and discard an old couch that was left in the house by previous owners. i would have to say job well done!!

house update

2008-09-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

well we have been very busy lately trying to get the laundry room done. as you can tell we have not posted in a while so a lot has been done. we have the drywall up as well as the light installed. we are very excited for it to get done because we have ordered the washer and dryer. we are hoping to be painting this weekend. more to come.

Phase 1

2008-07-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

One day this will be the laundry room.

we decided that shower was less important than having clean clothes so we decided that this nasty stand up shower needed to go in order to make room for a laundry room. we are still not sure where they did laundry before, maybe a bucket out on the back patio, who knows.

from the looks of things i thought this was a relatively new shower, after all there was an attempt to flip this house, but to my surprise it was not a beautiful one piece shower this was a mess. tile was underneath the vinyl and it was attached with some really nasty, gooey black gunk.

now there is no more shower...

so if anyone out there has the need to do some plumbing i would recommend doing like this... small jobs only. I used PEX with shark bite fittings. it eliminates the need to soldier and glue anything... all you do is press the pieces together and like magic it doesn't leak. we are further along with it now but still not done... ONE DAY!!

The front

2008-07-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

LeFRONT O' HOUSE

so the front of our house looks something like this... okay it is this. we have not done a whole lot to improve the front of our house so as they would say on those cheesy house shows- "It lacks curb appeal". what they don't see is all the wonderful things we have planned. the siding needs to be replaced, a yard would help (not pictured but it is very similar to the back, dirt), and yes a new garage door. i got bored one night and i did take out the ugly bush hiding the corner, looks really good now!! Randi was shocked when she saw what i had done.

What's behind door number 1...

2008-07-23T16:19:00.000-07:00

treasure? dead old lady? monsters?

My guess was the remains of an old lady. Don't ask!

They ruined a perfectly good closet with the HVAC system. So now we will have to create a closet for this bedroom. In Connecticut you can't call it a bedroom if it doesn't have a closet.

Living Room

2008-07-22T16:13:00.000-07:00

So this is my plan: I want to remove the old wood floors you see here and and put them in the sun room and paint them white. Then I want to lay new wood floors through out the house. We are hoping to do this in the winter. Can't wait!

Round Dining Room

2008-07-06T20:00:00.000-07:00

Dining Room from exterior

Dining Room from the interior

Once we saw this room we had to have the house!

Now that we have the house we need a round table that fits in the room. So far we have a few choices, none of which I want to pay for.
Here are a couple of our options

Platner Dining Table

Saarinen Dining Table

The Smelly Basement

2008-07-04T14:00:00.000-07:00

This is the piano board that we have no clue what to do with or how much it might be worth. My guess it's worth nothing.

This is the boiler that used to heat the water and maybe the house at one time. Notice the nice modern day water heater in the background.

This is what makes the basement smelly.

An old oil tank which still has tons of oil in it. I like to say this is our savings for a rainy day.

Saved the best for last!

On one whole side of the basement there are these old beer bottle labels.

The Sun Room

2008-07-01T16:25:00.001-07:00

Sun room(this is where we watch TV/Movies)

The House

2008-07-01T15:59:00.000-07:00

This is the back of the house.

Believe it or not we bagged 56 bags of leafs just for the back yard alone. The front yard was something like 16 bags.

Back yard from the deck.