Doors upstairs, etc.

I remembered that I don't think I ever noted the doors are on the guest room, guest room attic access and upstairs bathroom. Still no hardware, which its own pickle because all the hardware in the house is antique and the holes back then in doors were apparently much smaller than they are now. So everything is too tiny for the door holes, even though I went to the trouble of salvaging everything.

One day a few months ago, I was sitting on our pile of mattresses that was in the storage unit guest room, eyeballing this opening. (It was before the 2x4 was across the top, so it was just a funny-shaped hole. I was trying to figure out if I should order a giant-sized custom cabinet door and figure out how to affix it to the opening to cover our lovely storage area. (Actually it is lovely, compared to how it was. It's all drywalled and insulated and non-spidery. But that's not really the point.)

In the course of my eyeballing, I noticed it seemed to be rather wide. Like, normal-door wide. This sparked an idea. What about a real door? So I leapt up at a speed usually reserved for when I'm motivated by chocolate or alcohol and snatched the nearest tape measure. In our house, that's usually within about five feet. I think they breed in the closets when we're not home or something; I have no idea how we have so many. Anyway, a quick measure indicated that the opening was 28 inches, which I was pretty sure was a standard door size.

Lo and behold, it mostly was!! Now usually you have a rough opening of X and a door that is X-2". This, however, would have meant a bit of a tight squeeze and I didn't want to lose out on as much door width as I could get, so I just went ahead and jammed a 28" door into the 28 and 1/16" opening (or whatever it was. There was a decent amount of violent hammering involved to get that thing into place.)

This was after I sawed off the bottom 30 inches so it was short enough. I won't say it's the prettiest door hanging job, but for my first try, I can say that 1) it opens, 2) it closes and 3) it doesn't even really scrape the floor despite being so close to it. I call it a success. Plus, SUPER cheap. I bought the cheapest door Lowe's had with intentions of trimming it out so it's a bit shaker looking and matches the other doors.

The triangle gap above has already been patched and partially mudded, so that's going away soon too. As for a door handle, I put a little magnet closure thing in and have a plain cabinet pull I'm going to install. There's not really a need for a knob, and obviously the hole is dysfunctionally low.

 Ah, the door on the guest room. Yay!

 And on the bathroom, from the inside. They look pretty good! A little bit of trim will help them almost perfectly blend with the original doors of the house.

Kitchen Befores and Afters

So to be fair, the kitchen is not yet finished. In fact, relatively little progress has been made on the detail work I mentioned a few months ago. I've done some priming, but there's still caulking, sanding, more priming and plenty of painting yet to do. Although I have to say, using the same color on the trim as the walls seriously cuts down on time for painting.

In any case, I was poking through iPhoto trying to find a picture of my credit card because I was in the process of ordering a watercolor print of this squirrel drinking whiskey and was too lazy to get up and get my credit card. In the process, I ran across a number of pre-remodel kitchen pictures and was reminded that I never actually did a true before and after post of the kitchen.

Behold: the chaos, the dysfunction, the grime of our old kitchen. (I feel like it still hasn't been long enough for me to be able to look at these photos. It's kind of making my skin crawl.)

 

I can barely look at this without gagging. UGH.

I think these totally speak for themselves. Still work in progress, but still.

Additional happy news: our backsplash may go in as early as this week! It's 2"x4" white subway tile and we decided on aggressively sealed white grout. Todd held up a sheet of it (it comes in pre-set sheets) and I think it's going to look amazing. So there'll be more pictures of that coming someday soon.