It is currently about 20°F here in Denver with snow in the forecast several days this week. Obviously, we’ve all been inside much more than normal lately with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, but this weather means no garden or workshop time today. With that being the case, I decided it’s appropriate to discuss a recent indoor project that Allyson and I completed. Our house was built in the 1950s. Because of the age of our house, it did not include a bathroom vent fan when we moved in. Typically, older homes weren’t sealed very well (we can attest to that), which meant that moisture inside the home dried out without many mold issues. Modern homes are sealed much better, which dramatically improves their insulation, but can cause problems with moisture inside the house. That is why almost all homes built in the last 20 years include bathroom vent fans that…

Fun fact, collapsible can be spelled collapsable. Which might explain why both spellings look incorrect to me. Ah English, so simple and straightforward. Fun facts aside, today I want to talk about a quick and simple DIY build that I completed several weekends ago. Sawhorses are a must for most people doing DIY around the house, and I am ashamed that it took me almost 2 years in our house to build my own. I finally decided that working off of the ground was too much of a pain in the back (literally). Step one of getting up off of the ground was this sawhorse build. Step two will be building an actual workbench for my workshop.  There are a ton of Youtube videos out there giving instructions on how to build your own sawhorses. I decided to follow the plans from Woodworking for Mere Mortals. Steve Ramsey runs this…

I am not sure if I have mentioned this previously, and it is probably worth discussing at some point, but we had a really old electrical panel on the house when we moved in. I mean, I’m talking original to the 1955 house old.  Definitely not safe or adequate for our needs. This panel (and a sub-panel in the kitchen) totaled 100 amps. Our new panel is 200. This was something we knew would have to be upgraded when we moved in to support the needs of a modern home (i.e. the electric car charger) so it wasn’t a surprise or a big hardship to upgrade the panel. What was slightly unexpected was the hole in our house’s stucco that was left behind when the old panel was removed. In order to support the larger panel, it was placed right next to the old location, leaving behind a missing patch…

And they say ouch...Yikes, that was a rough intro into the post this week, our project to fix up under our kitchen bar. If you remember from a couple of weeks ago, this is what the bar looked like when we moved into our house. Also a big yikes. And here is what under the bar looked like after we pulled those cabinets away. And here is what the bar looked like after we fixed the floor. Once we finished fixing the floor, it was time to fix the wall underneath the bar. Allyson, as the household design expert (despite Tuxedo’s best efforts), decided that a board and batten design would be the best, and I was more than happy to implement. Because we added brackets underneath the bar for support (this may have been overkill, but I got a little paranoid about the unsupported 18” overhang), I had to…

A few cursery google searches and it is pretty clear that refinishing a section of hardwood floors is a difficult task, even if the work itself is relatively straight forward. The main issue comes in matching the repaired section of stain/finish to the hardwood that surrounds it. Even using the original stain to patch sections can be problematic and end up with easily visible patch jobs throughout your hardwood floors. That being said, Allyson and I “decided” to patch our hardwood floor because there’s no way a patch would look worse that this.... Some people could call this a focal point of the room, just not in a good way. As I discussed previously, the flipper left us with some problem areas in our house, and the area under our bar in the kitchen was one of them. The first step to fix the issue was to refinish the section…

For the past year or so, Allyson and I have thought “what were they thinking” quite a few times as we look at all of the work that was done in our house by a “flipper”. Some times, it’s relatively small things that I will end up fixing at some point, like not properly hanging light fixtures on walls so you can see the hole in the drywall behind it. Other times it is about something that is unforgivable and they should be forced to sit at a table for a week where everyone is bragging about their job and story topping (this is my own personal Hell, yours may be different). Take how they hung the lights in our bathroom for instance. Looks great right? Can you see the issue here? We didn’t see it immediately, but when we did it became impossible to unsee. *Glass shattering* It does…