It’s been a year since my last post. I’ve been silent but I have not been idle — that too-small sink cutout from my last post got fixed by the plumber’s helper, who trimmed it easily with a grownup’s saw when he arrived to hook up the lines. Then I finished the cabinets with black paint, tiled the backsplash with 4 1/2 inch white squares, installed matching appliances and a new tenant moved in.  

The backsplashes add a lot, even though I use whatever tiles I find on the sale shelf at Lowes.

I’ve done two more kitchens since then, and have one more to go.

Here’s one. This place is already occupied.

Here’s another one, finished just last week. Still needs caulk.

Quick rundown with some of what I have accomplished and what I hope to accomplish in that vacant unit in the student ghetto.

I sometimes forget each of those places is a three-bedroom, two story house. Can be a lot of work when it’s totally trashed, as this one was.

Just to make it liveable, it needed five interior doors, three interior door frames and one exterior door frame, a new range, a new refrigerator, about a half dozen pieces of new wall paneling, four electric baseboard heaters, two dozen floor tiles, six window screens, at least a dozen ceiling panels. All of the above were destroyed by the wanton behavior by the last tenant, almost certainly fueled by alcohol.

Then, in addition to the replacement jobs, the place needs all of its filthy drop ceilings to be cleaned and painted, new paint in the bathroom, new carpet on the stairs, hallway and bedroom floors, a really good cleaning and polishing of the first floor vinyl floor and the big job, a major overhaul of the 1980s kitchen.

The old cabinets, doors removed

In the last remodel a single 6-foot base counter was installed across the rear wall of the apartment with coordinating top cabinets and another 24-inch top cabinet and range hood to fill the space between the cabinets and the rear door with an apartment-sized range.
There’s never been an apartment-sized range there, always a second-hand, standard 30-inch range that sticks out six inches from the cabinet and hood above.

The refrigerator just sat randomly against the left wall.

The countertop is bright yellow laminate, nicely built and durable but like the cabinets that are solid wood but were never fine furniture, beat to hell from years of abuse and just butt ugly.

Also, the place needs a dishwasher. Few of today’s students are willing to live without one. The ones who do often just let the dishes pile up around the place until they graduate.

First I was gonna rip out and replace the cabinets. Too expensive and honestly, too big a job for my first cabinet project. Then I thought of replacing just the bottom unit with individual pieces to accommodate the dishwasher. Also expensive, also a huge challenge for my nascient skills, and the top cabinets would no longer line up with the base — the sink would be off-center under the shorter cabinet above it. And, it turned out, the unpainted cabinets in my price range were no better quality than the beat-up vintage ones set in place 30 years ago by contractors who obviously knew what they were doing.

The final plan, already underway at this writing — repaint the old cabinets, build a 24-inch space for the dishwasher where the range had been and put a new countertop over the whole run, increasing counter space by two feet. Tile the rear wall with whatever I can get for under $1 a square foot. Turned out the old base cabinet wasn’t standard height, so I’ll leave the 5/8 inch countertop in place and lay the new countertop on it. Even easier.

I’ll have to hire an electrician to move the 220 line against the left wall, where I’ll put a top cabinet with a range hood and a narrow base cabinet and top cabinet between the range and frig.

The local lumber yard was clearing out some old stock and I bought some decent oak cabinets for the range area — one 12-inch base, one 12-inch wall and one 30×18 wall for above the range, all three for under $100. Could have used a 15- or even 18-inch base cabinet in the available space, but they were’t selling any of those.

Haven’t committed yet to the Lowes countertop that I’d have to cut down myself, or the made-to-order one from the local lumber yard which would come with the sink hole cut and the end cap factory-installed. I’m leaning to the locals, it’s a great lumber yard that lets me run a tab and has a fabulous wood shop that does a lot of stuff for me, much of it free. The cost would be about $75 more but I do like to support the local business and I am scared of my circular saw.

For the range area, a sheet of laminate glued to the wall and a countertop made of two 12-inch black granite floor tiles with a porcelain-tile bullnose edge.

Decided to go with black paint on the old cabinets and leave the new oak ones alone. Try to coordinate everything with countertop and backsplash.

I’m not done talking but there’s no time for more. As I look at what I just said I’m less guilty about feeling exhausted. It’s a big job for one mildly arthritic person who has to learn how to do almost every task except painting before she attempts it.

Hard to believe there isn’t tons of good advice on the web about painting drop ceilings.  I can’t be the only one stuck with them.

But I had to delve deeply into the internet to find a blog by a sweet Canadian woman who’s fixing up her townhouse on a tight budget.  She had a great tip — prop the tiles up slightly with a pair of long sticks — she used packages of furring strips — then paint the edges while they’re raised.  Then drop them down and use a roller to paint the centers of the tiles.

I don’t have any boxes of furring strips, but I will be buying narrow long lumber to repair door frames.  With something on the end to prevent puncturing the tiles — I’m thinking, tennis balls — it will sure save time if it works.

Thanks, Tanya, at http://dans-le-townhouse.blogspot.com/2012/04/basement-update-lazy-guide-to-painting.html

Hanging my first door, hearing it close with a successful click, was a major thrill. It couldn’t have been an easier door to hang, but it was still soo satisfying.

Cost: $21 at Lowes for a 24-inch hollow unfinished flat surface luan interior door. What I used to pay a contractor to hang a new door varied, but anywhere from $50 to $150, guesstimate.

For an expert the job would have been a no brainer because the old broken door was right there with the knobs in place. There was no trimming required, I had the three hinges and the door frame was fine with the striker plate in place. It was just a matter of exactly copying the hinge cutouts and the holes for the knobs.

Even so, I sweated it. And I didn’t have the perfect tool for the cutouts. I laid the old door on the new door and marked the location of the hinges, then traced the semicircular hinge on the door edge. I could see that the prior contractor used a tool that cut the exact shape and depth of the hinge in one fast move. I found out later the thing to use is a router with a hinge template, which I guess I should invest in since I have 32 interior doors among those four student ghetto units and some years more than half of them get smashed. The door frame often breaks along with the door, but that’s another chapter.

I did my hinge cutouts with my multi tool and a chisel — outlined the cut with the multi tool and then chiseled it out with small cuts until the hinge laid in there level with the surface.

I practiced four times on the old door before cutting into my pristine $21 door, which was actually pretty good looking. Really butchered the test door on the first try but each subsequent cut got closer to adequate as I learned to control the chisel.

Even so, each hinge cutout took 15-20 minutes and still looked choppy. It was hard to manage the depth of the cut. I worried that would make the door hang unevenly, but it worked.

The doorknob hole was easy — traced the old door, drilled a pilot hole and then one plunge with the right-sized hole saw from my lovely collection of new drill bits that goes with my lovely new cordless drill, a practical gift from a thoughtful friend.

I was grateful to get that drill and I’m grateful every time I drill a hole. Still, I wonder why some girls attract pretty, frivolous presents, serious bling, companions, and money, while I attract hardware. I’ve been a pretty good person; I wonder exactly which forks in the path of life sent me to this cold, solitary place.

Sometimes I wonder. Most of the time I’m just happy to have good tools.

When I got to the latch edge, again a router would have done it right. Used the 1-inch hole saw for whatever you call that part of the latch that comes out of the door knob and goes into the striker plate. With a router I could have made a shallow indentation around that hole for the plate that surrounds that thing whose name I don’t know.

As it was, I installed the edge plate on the surface as neatly as I could. It looked OK and worked fine. But I’m glad it’s not my bathroom door, where I’d see that imperfection several times a day.

You can see from the photo of the old door cutout that a router did the job perfectly and fast. I’m shopping for one. A little router you can carry around costs about $100. And a set of door templates costs about $10.

Probably should have stained the door before I hung it, but I was too anxious to see how it would hang. I drilled the nine holes for the hinge screws and hoisted it into the frame, using my toe and the handle of my hammer to level it while I turned the screws.

After the major satisfaction of hearing it close neatly without dragging anywhere on the frame, I gave it two coats of Minwax PolyShades American Chestnut colored stain/ polyurethane combo. There are so many different shades of stain on the woodwork in that place, but the chestnut looks OK.

It’s a light door, it’s a cheap door, but I gotta say, it looks as good as that kind of door can look. The job I did was just as good as anything done by the last professional contractor that worked in that place, and waay better than the crappy work done by the last couple of handymen I hired.

Shall fill in later; it was a success.

Meanwhile, here are some pix.

I am pretty excited about hanging my first door. It will be a 24-inch-wide flat hollow door on the bathroom at my student ghetto project and I have the old broken door to use as a pattern. I got the door tonight at Lowes, hauling it to the site in my old Chrysler by sticking it through the passenger window and holding it over my head while I drove. Luckily it was dark and I didn’t have to get close to anything on the right. Couldn’t do that with a wider door, and definitely won’t be able to do it with the 30-inch prehung I’m gonna need for one of the bedrooms.

Also got a 10-pack of ceiling tiles, probably about a tenth of the amount I’ll need to finish the whole place, both floors. I plan to salvage whatever existing tiles that have anywhere close to the same hole pattern as the new ones, and give both the old and new ones a quick coat of Walmart flat white wall paint.

Those two purchases blew the budget for the weekend. Looking forward to my work day tomorrow.

Did get an unexpectedly early rent payment from the new roomer at the brick house. He was supposed to move in mid-month but moved it up two weeks. That’s fortunate; his rent will cover the deposit I’ll return to the tenant moving out. And I got an email from a guy interested in that room. Life is good.