Mattress In A Box

Granted, it is not home renovation. But it is comfort renovation.
We originally spent over $1000 on a memory foam, pillow-top mattress.

I've learned that memory foam does not compare in performance to a Posturepedic mattress.
Ours had a 6 inch pillow-top on top of the memory foam and over time, the mattress began to memorize our bodies. The impressions became very pronounced and thus, I've had back pain for over 2 years.

We didn't know what to do with the thing. It weighs about 150 pounds and it's nearly impossible to move. Rather than dumping the mattress, we decided to turn it over. The bottom side has no pillow-top, only memory foam. But it was simply too firm to sleep on.

In Comes the Mattress in a Box.

We came across the mattress on Overstock.com and saw many good reviews - Ordered almost right away. Why re-purchase a $1000 mattress every 3-4 years when we can replace the top(or bottom in this case)for only $350?

First, we had to make sure it would fit. Mattress in a box is 11 inches thick. Our current mattress (no box spring) was 18 inches thick. That's way too much mattress. Our ceilings are low!

We had to move all of the hardware on the bed frame down a full 6 inches so that we would be working with a bit more room.

The new mattress comes in an unusually manageable box. It was all beat up from the trip, but once out of the box, it appeared it was well protected. We then had to remove it from a couple of sleeves. Once out of the sleeves you see it is in vacuum sealed in plastic.

Here you can see how the vacuum sealed size

compares to our Massive King Sized mattress.

Here is video of the mattress being unsealed and settling onto the bed:

And Finally, here is the mattress laid out. We have just a little bit of headboard left! The mattress came yesterday but we hadn't put it on the bed right away and it is important, according to the directions, to wait 4-6 hours before lying on the mattress. So tonight will be the first. We'll let you know how it goes!

Reptilian Half-Whit

I'm not sure why this guy came by for a visit,
or, for that matter, how he got on the window sill.
Maybe he is a she. How does one know with turtles?

Whatever.

Perhaps this animal made the trek over to our place to observe our new tool?





We spent 25$ on this scraper, so I hope it was worth it. We have a lot of linoleum to remove. After scraping for only 2 minutes, I broke a sweat. This is going to be difficult. I can't imagine trying this with a scraper any smaller than this one.

Laborious Kitch

It's great to have a clean kitchen.
But a clean kitchen comes with a lot of labor even while it functions normally.
When you're destroying it, the cleaning becomes much more difficult.

After you're done with destroying only 1/2 of the space, it's a huge mess. No one can get through without serious risks of Cancer.

Just kidding.
But there IS a lot of dust. Dust that has circled the area for 30 years.
That part can be dealt with using the Shop Vac. But the part I cannot take right now is the stuff falling through from the ceiling. We had to remove soffits.

My general feeling right now is that we never, ever, ever want to remove a soffet again.(we will remove more soffets in this old house)
They are very hard to remove without damaging a large part of the dry-wall they are attached to and they tend to reveal, in this case, the one place where good construction took a back seat to a quick finish. See Above-

This is the second place that I found where the area behind a soffet revealed collapsing dry-wall from the ceiling. The problem is that when that collapses, rock wool falls.

I've been told this is rock wool, anyway. I'm not sure.
But I know that I was in the attic a week ago, hanging the fans, and I breathed in a lot of that stuff.

More importantly, it's falling into the kitchen. I can't stand that. I've been doing everything I can to avoid it falling - including using some of the soffet dry-wall scraps to stop it. Here I have half of the kitchen removed. And I've used some of the stuff you see leaning against the wall as my safe guard until I get the final dry-wall.

Unfortunately, I have more soffet to remove. More Kitchen to remove. When will the day come? When we can cook up some Thai Stir Fry? Good Lord, We want some Pad Thai!!!!

Right now we eat whatever we can find in a box. And that's not very green. Kind of depressing.

PS. I've looked up the term "SOFFET" and I found several results. My original thought was that it was "Sauphet," which was entirely incorrect. But the accepted spellings were "soffit" and "soffet" as far as this situation requires. Coincidentally, when I google "sauphet" I get Thai results.

To Re-Route or Not To Re-Route?

We need to ask the reader a question.
What do we do here?
I have an electrical line that I want to re-route to the upper window sill.
Here is the pic.

I want to drill through all of the 2X4 planks and route the electricity down through the upper sill and put lighting just above the sink this way. Is this a bad idea? What might I run into? I feel like it should be fine as long as I don't electricitize myself.

I have a drill fully capable of this work.

Next, we have a ventilation system that ran just above the microwave to vent the countertop range.
The new range will move over to the right about 2 feet. But the vent is in the wrong place here.


What do I do? Do I even need ventilation?

10 Gallon Hat

It's not so much a hat, really, because the shower head is much too low to stand under. One must bend. This is difficult to do in the morning.

I measured the water flow at full stream.
I can't say that I know what the average water flow for a shower head is per minute. But this head clocks in at an impressive 4 Gallons per minute!

We plan to use a flexible shower head from our previous house but the current hardware is making this impossible.

Everything about this ball-socket is conjuring hatred from me aside from the fact that it's fallic. Only GOD himself could remove this hardware. I'm gonna need a locking wrench and a torch to remove it (two tools which we do not have). The thread is more corroded than a geriatric hip(No offense).

Post Script: After a Googling of the subject, it appears this ball shower head is not meant to be removed. Who knew? I bought an adjustable locking vice grip wrench to get this thing off and it did nothing. I guess I now know why. We'll have to remove the pipe from the water line in the wall and replace it. What a turd.

Shall We Rest?

Not really, no.
But we didn't get much done tonight. First, we shopped for some drapes.

Drapes take a long time to find. For some reason.
It took us 2 hours to look through 2 stores and we found nothing.

So we came home, had a glass of wine and some Mexican food.........

Yeah. That slowed things down a bit.

We hung 2 sets of blinds (Which can be real difficult if you mount them from above) and put together a bunk bed. I don't think I need to show you pictures of that.

But here is a weird picture you might enjoy:
Home renovation can cause a lot of chemicals and material to accumulate in your respiratory system. So this thing might come in handy. Can't seem to get our hands on one though.

Kitchen Demo Starts

We haven't completely finished the girls bedrooms, but the new cabinets for the kitchen will arrive in a couple of weeks and I need to rip out the entire kitchen and patch it up before they get here. Father-in-law is here to help. We have a brick wall lining one of the cabinets that we need to knock out.

If you don't remember, above this is the original kitchen.
The wood is nice but it's very old. It took a lot of work finagling this stuff out because it was obviously custom built with the house.

But with some patience, we were able to get 30% of it removed in a few hours. We want to try and save all of these cabinets so that they can be used by someone else. We hate sending things to the dump especially when the items are so nice. This is really good wood.

We thought that, perhaps, the brick wall was a facade and that it would be easy to tap out. We were wrong. It was real brick. However, after getting the cabinet away, it damn near fell down if you leaned against it. With a few hammer hits on each block, it came loose and we were able to get all the brick out easily.

First, we had to cut across the laminate countertop to save as large a piece as possible so that it could be re-used. A jig saw did the trick there. Once we got that peice off we moved on to the brick.
Caution: Wear Goggles when hammering brick and mortar!
A bit of mortar shot off into my eye. In thine EYE!
Be careful, troopers.




We're probably going to re-use this brick as a walkway to our pool, whenever that happens.
But we will re-use it in some way.

Getting there

We've been busting our butts. Non-stop since we've been in the house, we've been working to get these 2 bedrooms done. We're getting very close. But the animals are just chillin' like there is no care in the world.
Get a job!

Oh well. We've spent a bit more on these rooms than we anticipated, but they look quite amazing. We installed the new plates and electrical hardware as well as a new fans to replace old light fixtures.

Here I'm installing a "5-minute fan" from Lowe's. I can tell you one thing: It took a hell of a lot longer than 5 minutes. Granted, it was an easy system and the blades do hook on easily, but the directions suck.

There is a ring that, in the very first picture of instructions, places it in the right position. But after that, it isn't mentioned again. I had to completely take everything down after the first install because I forgot to place the ring in the proper order. Anyhow, the fan's are nice and add a very modern look to the room.

The 5 minute fan is pretty nice and it did not need balancing although it came with tools to achieve it. The Model number is 20729 from Hunter ceiling fans. Probably nicer than any other fan I've installed.
The blades are reversible but you must be careful not to scuff the other side with the locking system when you install the blades.

We then installed new electrical hardware and plates. We are really big fans of the brushed steel look, so we replaced all of the plates with silver plating and black units in one room and white in the other.

With all of the trim up, we are near finished. Here are the original pics and the new pics.

How far we have come!

Fresh Prince Does Trim?

So it wasn't the Fresh Prince after all. But apparently he sent one of his minions to make sure we do the trim right this time.

I guess doing trim is below the prince.
c'est la vie.

In the past, we've done trim the hard way. We bought very cheap wood. We didn't sand it and we didn't prime it. We painted before we installed. We nailed with a hammer.



There are a massive number of problems with this philosophy.
1. Buying cheap wood introduces a number of problems aside from looking cheap
2. Painting trim before you put it on the wall causes it to bow or skew
3. Without sanding and priming, the trim looks.....cheap
4. You're reminded everyday thereafter that you didn't correct 1 through 3

From the start we decided to spend a little more and get nicer wood. We decided on Pine. Most all of the planks were perfectly straight and the surfaces were dang near perfect. There were zero knots and very little sanding would be needed.

The addition of prime is minimal. It costs very little and a light coat is all that is needed. It dries within minutes.

Right after priming, we sanded these suckers. Here is another good tip: Don't sand manually.
We had this vibrating sander before we started all of this but they cant cost more than $30. doing it this way saved me a lot of time and a lot of energy.

I actually laid the trim out in the rooms before we
primed them just to make sure my measurements were correct.

Here is a tip that is one of the most valuable I can give you in renovation: Buy or borrow an Air Compressor and Pneumatic nailer!

This saves so much time I can't even express it without throwing a desk on your head. This is a 27 gallon air compressor tank I borrowed from my boss. I'm in I.T. so only God knows why my boss has a 27 Gallon air compressor, but whatever.

I was able to get all of the trim nailed up to the walls in both rooms in under 2 hours. Be careful around the kids because these suckers are quick and strong. I'd never used one before but they are simple instruments.

Next, we filled the gaps and nail holes with wood filler. I didn't want any obvious seams to show.





A little bit of light sanding the next day, a quick wipe down of all of the trim on the wall, and we're ready to paint.

WE didn't hesitate this time. We bought our paint from Lowe's as to avoid doing a thousand coats.
I calked the trim before we painted. This made it easier because we only had to tape the carpet.



Here is the trim up and finished.
Looks pretty dang good. Minion can move on.

Thank you, Fresh prince, for the supervision.

Keep your head about you

OK, It's small, but it's got to be done.

There was a leaky water line behind the washer when we moved in. Needs to be replaced.

Another hint: Talk to anyone doing renovation and I guarantee they've found a plumber that works on the side. Our friend referred us to a guy that works for local plumbing company but he charges less an hour for side work. Let's do it.

We're having him run a new water line for the shower in the master bath, a new gas line when the new kitchen comes(for the new gas range), and to fix the leak behind the Clothes washer. Here are the new heads.

It's not a major improvement but just knowing we have shiny, new hardware back there makes me feel like we've done well.

Fresh Prince gets new carpet

You may have noticed that I'm posting more than once a day. That's because we are actually done with some of the renovation and I'm trying to catch up with all of the developments for this blog.

On that note, the fresh prince came by for a visit. It's been raining like crazy for the past few days (Conveniently while we are renovating and moving).
He is clearly hangin' on the front porch to supervise the new carpet installation from Lowe's.
We picked a sliver/gray carpet with a medium thickness pad. Including the carpet pad underneath it cam to about $2.50 per sq foot. Not cheap carpet but not expensive either.

Had to pull the old carpet myself to save money.
With that, I scraped the floor of all of the compressed carpet pad from the last 2o yrs and got the slab as pristine as I could. We want to eliminate as much of the stale house smell as possible.

This picture right here features Craig's butt (the installer). He doesn't like rap music, but other than that, he's hunky dory. The carpet is looking nice. And the smell is getting better.

Bathroom Break Boss?

You don't need to ask me every time you need to use the restroom.

That is, unless my toilet uses 3 gallons of water to flush. Take a look at this video of the old toilet and just make a guess. This thing flushes full stream for nearly 15 seconds and has very little power.(See the new toilet flush lower on this page)


What if I had a chicken-fried chicken dinner and mashed potatoes the day before? Let's not think about that. But I can tell you that I was scared the first few times I flushed this toilet when it contained something because I was afraid it wouldn't go down.

In a major change to be green, we went on a search for a dual flush toilet. They can be expensive, so we had to do our homework. If you're searching for a water saving toilet that has enough power, look no further. We found a single flush toilet that is not only powerful, but very affordable.

This is the Aquasource All In One High-Efficiency High-Performance Toilet from Lowe's.
The model Number is TL-7600HC-HET-LO. It was only $112.00 and was worth every penny. I thought that the quality might be lacking but I found that it was a good buy. We purchased two and replaced both bathroom toilets.

However, I'd never replaced a toilet before so I had to talk to the Facility Supervisor at my job to give me the run-down. It wasn't all that bad and it only required about an hour of my time for each toilet. The AquaSource came with all of the parts needed to do the full install except for the tools. Something I hadn't anticipated was getting the water out of the old toilet. The trusty shop-vac did the job. I turned the water off, flushed the toilet and then sucked the remaining water from the drain. (Take another look at that wallpaper !!! )
Then I had to remove the toilet which is quite easy, and clean up the floor underneath. The wax ring is the most disgusting thing about the underside of a toilet. Especially this one since it had been sitting there for about 25 yrs. Remember to stick some paper in the drainage hole to keep gases from coming into the house - and so you don't have to stare into the pipe, good lord.

I had to use a hack saw to cut the bolts when I was done, but other than that the directions were simple. Just make sure you have all the tools you'll need before-hand. I used a socket wrench, a flat-head screwdriver, a putty knife and a hacksaw (And plenty of paper towels - that wax is thick stuff).
Make sure the new wax ring makes a good seal when you place the new toilet to the ground.

Q: How much water does it use?
From my estimation, it uses about 1 gallon of water per flush. But you can adjust the amount with the device in the tank. If you don't have enough flush strength, raise the available water level in the tank and you're finished. Normally I just tap the handle rather than hold it down and I bet it uses less than one gallon!

Now, the moment you've been waiting for. Watch the AquaSource flush! It exactly as advertised:

That's only a 4 second flush! The review on this toilet is very high and I highly recommend getting one. 5 stars. This is going to save a lot on the water bill. And here is a bonus: You'll never see water overflowing onto your floor if it gets stopped up because it doesn't use enough on the flush to spill over!
Booyah.

2 Bedrooms: Part 2

Note to self (and to blog reader): Do not buy paint from Home Depot.

The girls browsed the paint swatches at each store and chose the colors for their rooms.
One of them was not available at Lowe's, so we had to get it from Home Depot. It was a Glidden Evermore brand paint. Why on earth would Home Depot feature a paint that requires 5-6 coats? Pathetic.

We purchased the no VOC Olympic paint from Lowe's. It required one coat and then a second that was really just for touch-up. The other room, however, required 5 coats and it was still not opaque. After spending hours in this small room, we decided to nip the paint project in the bud and finish it up with a black glaze.

Fairly inexperienced with glaze, it took us a little while to figure out the proper technique. We used a cheesecloth and basically dabbed random spots about the wall and as the cloth begins to desaturate we started blending. Looks pretty good.

We also installed the new shelving for the closets:

2 Bedrooms

Before we moved in, we got started on renovating the girl's rooms. The only thing we won't be touching in these rooms is the ceiling. They're painted well and textured nicely, so well be leaving them alone.

Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures of these rooms before I remove the old trim and doors.
The woodwork was as expected, old stained wood. It looked like the original stain so you know it was porous and crusty, but luckily, it came off the walls without a problem.

I used a nice flat pry bar to keep from damaging the dry-wall behind everything. The dry-wall is thick and in good shape so I'm glad we were able to keep it. In one room the carpet is beige and tho other has an impression marble style done in a mix of browns.

Though, they are not completely hideous, they're very old and dusty and there is no telling what's going on with the carpet pad underneath, having been there for 20 yrs! Nice.


You can see here where I've carefully removed the closet shelves.
This was fairly time consuming only because they were anchored so well. Honestly, the shelves are good quality, so we'll most likely be reusing them somewhere in the house. We always try to reuse what we have and if we can't for some reason, we will give it away on freecycle.

If you don't know what freecycle.org is, look to see if it is in use your area. It's a local, community-based online forum where you can post things you no longer have a use for. Essentially, it is an opportunity to recycle anything for free to your neighbors. That way it doesn't end up at the dump.

Back to renovation.

I puttied all the nail holes in each room and went to town filling in what was left behind form the closet demolitions. It's very important to us that these rooms look near-new when we're finished with them. There is nothing worse than having to go back and redo things a year later because you failed to make the extra effort to do it right the first time.

Now, I'm no professional spackler, but putty is cheap and I used as much as I felt was necessary to get the walls as smooth as possible. A little light sanding, and these walls will be ready for prime!


In the next few days, our best friends are going to be Lowe's and Home Depot. Break out the American Express Card!