Dressing room

I can't believe it's been 5!! whole months since I last wrote about our dressing room. Five months?! How did that happen?
Last time I mentioned this former kitchen turned master bedroom suite, I finished sealing the stenciled floors. You can read about that here.

[After]

This is what it looked like then. We built in two shelf towers (his and hers) on either side of the door to the master bath, added rods for hanging clothes and pretty much called it a day. When I finished trimming out the master bath with baseboards and quarter rounds, I used up my left over bits in the dressing room.

Gotta use the momentum when you have it!

Then, when I added the door jamb and frame to the door on the master bathroom side of things, I kept the momentum going and did the same for the other side as well. Yesterday I finally got around to caulking the seams so now things are actually getting to the point of paint!

Sometime ago I also trimmed out the top and bottom of our shelf towers for a nicer, more finished look.

Woop-dee-doo!

[In Progress]

I need to pick up some quarter rounds to finsih off the base molding and touch up the paint. Of course, even though we've been using our dressing room, it's clearly not finished. So, what needs to be done?

• 
  
  finish base molding with quarter round


• 
  
  touch up paint


• 
  
  add light fixture


• 
  
  install threshold to bathroom


• 
  
  fix threshold to bedroom


• 
  
  add a rug


• 
  
  add an ottoman or bench


• 
  
  add a shelf for shoes


• 
  
  add window treatments

Plenty of stuff still left to do, right? Yep, it never ends. Of course, I'll aslo never grow bored.

Obviously

During last week's painting marathon nothing got away, not even the door to the hallway closet. Since it may or may not stay, we're leaving things "as-is" for now which includes keeping the ugly cheap hollow core door. However, since last week the golden oak eyesore sports a fresh coat of bright and clean white.

[After: White and ... blah]

Something had to happen. For a moment I was contemplating painting it black to match our entry door, but I just couldn't justify the confusion that might create. I also wasn't too keen on drawing too much unwanted attention to the closet door and if anything, black doors are real showstoppers.

So I thought I could label it, right? That would deal with any possible confusion ("Is that the bathroom?"), add a little bit of spiff and satisfy my craving for decorating.

After contemplating just which word to use ("Coats" didn't cut it), I decided to go with the obvious:

"Closet"

Since I don't have any fancy cutting machine, I had to do it the old-fashioned way. I designed my label, printed it out and coated the back with graphite powder for a homemade carbon-copy paper effect.

Here it is, taped into place.

After deciding on the placement close to the knob - centered but not in line with the knob, simply because it looked good to me - I traced it onto the door. The graphite backing (if you don't keep any fancy-schmancy art supplies around you can simply rub the back of your design with a pencil - that works just as well) created a copy of faint outlines on the door: just strong enough to be visible but not too dark to create issue removing any extra lines.


After that I grabbed a small brush and some black-brown acrylic paint and started painting in my label. It wasn't all that easy. Not that the design was complicated, oh no, it was more the placement that made it too high to kneel and to low to comfortably stand while painting. I turned into quite the contortionist and if I had a yoga instructor, I'm sure they'd been quite proud of me.


Here we go, all done! Of course it isn't machine perfection but it's darling. Really!

Now my closet is stating the obvious, or perhaps it's proudly announcing for all to see that it is indeed a closet and not the door to the bathroom!

Got label? What's the latest thing you put a label on?

With the jamb firmly in place, I finally got to tackle the pretty part: the door casing. That's the fancy schmancy name for the trim that goes around your door frame. I'd picked up two 1x4 boards, 2 plinths and a piece of trim called a "stop" to mimik the existing trim in the house.

Lucky for me, no miter cuts were required for this project!

First up: the plinth. That's the decorative part at the bottom of the door frame. For the most part, the plinths in our house have very little decoration - some our just plain pieces of wood wider than the trim - and so the ones I found at the Blue Box fit the bill quite nicely: they have a little bit of carving which mirrors the top of the baseboards and the price was right too.

After installing the plinths aka nailing them into place, the sides of my door casing came next. All I had to do - thanks to the ingenius design of historic trim in our house -was measure the distance between the top of the plinth and the upper edge of my door opening, cut my boards to size and nail those into place as well.

I'd bought a length of plain "stop" trim to cap off the sides, just like on all the original door casings in our house. Since our bathroom and dressing room are a later addition to the house (years ago, a previous owner added a second story to the originally one-story part housing our kitchen), the ceiling is quite a bit lower as you can see. Thus, the husband and I are musing about bumping out the ceiling for a vaulted and airier headspace. It's not as bad as you'd think - especially since we painted everything white, both rooms feel light and spacious and you notice the low ceiling more like an afterthought.

A short length of a 1x2 board tops it all off. Voila! - historically accurate looking door casing. Oone side down, one more to go!

This whole project didn't take me that long. Of course, now we're back to the basics of caulking between boards and filling in those nail holes, priming and painting. It -never- ends, does it?

Jammin' the jamb

In our master bathroom we have finally reached the "finishing touches" stage. Over are the days of major construction (ahem, aside from the husband and me musing whether to remove the ceiling to create a vaulted ceiling above the bathroom ... it's really just a crazy idea ...for now ..maybe later. You know, when we've pleasantly forgotten about how rotten a thing dry wall dust really is.) and we have a basic room with working fixtures! Yay us!

[Before: In its former life as Duplex, our master bathroom was the kitchen for the

upstairs apartment. It was nothing but gross and grungy. It gets great light, though.]

And here, for a collective sigh of relief, are two of the "close to the finishing line" shots

[Getting there: baseboard in place but not yet nailed and caulked]

There's very little that's not new. We have

new plumbing
updated electric
new subfloor
partially new drywall
new tile
fresh paint
new baseboards
new fixtures (sink, clawfoot tub and toilet)

The next item on my project list for this room was "frame door" so I investigated the design of our existing doors throughout the house and started poking around on the internet for pointers as to how to frame and trim out the door between our master bath and the adjoining dressing room. The nice thing about a historic home like ours is that you don't have to worry about perfect miter cuts.
While door and window casing is put together from more pieces than the average modern casing, it is cut at square angles and stacked rather than cut at intricate angles that require mega accurate measuring and cutting.
Lucky me!
I found this carpentry ebook online and found it rather helpful in learning to name the various parts of a door frame and how exactly things go together http://www.woodworking-online.com/chapter8/1.html. That's how I learned that a door jamb had to come first. The door jamb is the vertical inside portion of the frame onto which you secure your door.

I hopped over to the Blue Box and after browsing the aisles I decided to pick up this simple door jamb kit. It had all the pieces in the right amounts in the right widths which cut down on any unnecessary guesswork and measuring on my part. I -did- measure my door opening before going to the store, though, to make sure the jamb was wide enough. Live and learn, baby, live and learn.

Fortunately, I got to reap the rewards of having had great contractors build the wall and door opening. The existing door frame was plumb and level so all I really had to do (and did) was measure the length of each side, cut the 'legs' to the appropriate length, measure the space for the header and cut that one as well and then slide the whole frame into the opening and tapping it lightly with the hammer for a nice flush fit.

Tada! Our door way started looking like an actual door way right away, even though the casing aka the trim along the outside of the door frame was still missing. A handful of nails later we had a jamming jamb and were ready to move on to the actual casing. More on that tomorrow!

One door closes, one door opens

One of the things that can drive you slightly insane when you buy an old home in need of repairs, is the necessity to "project-hop" as we've decided to call it. You can't just take the time to paint all of the trim for 6 weeks or just use the next 2 weeks to bring all of the windows to ship-shape. Sure enough, the moment you're settled in with all your project tools and supplies in place, something needs to be done first/breaks and has to be fixed - not to mention the kind of brain-numbing boredom and paralysis that sets in if you do the same thing over and over without the fresh wind from a new and exciting project.

So after a great evening with friends, BBQ, campfire and s'more we woke to the sounds of torrential rains the next morning. No big deal - still plenty to do inside to keep us busy and from catching cabin fever. I don't remember what we'd settled on doing that day, but those plans went out the window when husband had to ram the shed door to get to a piece of needed supply. The rain and the high humidity had caused the awful shed door to swell and rendered it unusable. Since we couldn't just leave it open, our plans changed to "install new shed door".

[Before: Old nasty door. God only knows why somebody had cut
a rectangle into it only to cover it with a piece of ply again]

Dear husband made a dash to the home improvement store to pick up a new exterior door and returned soon after with a brandnew JELD-WEN pre-hung panel door and some galvanized screws and nails. Everything else we fortunately had already on hand.

[In-Progress: Taking apart the existing frame]

Since this was our first door install, we watched a couple of DIY videos, ogled the existing door frame construction, deliberated and brainstormed about the approach and then started taking the old frame apart since the new door came pre-hung.

[In-Progress: Rebuilding the opening to fit]

After taking it apart, putting it back together didn't seem so daunting anymore. It's funny how you seem to 'grow' with each project in both your DIY abilities and confidence. Half a year ago, I'm pretty sure we'd have squeaked like little school girls at the thought of replacing a door with frame.

[After: Almost finished - the door is hung, level and as plumb as you
can get in a 97 old wooden house]

Once the hardware was installed, we could take a breath. Except for a light sprinkle, the weather had been good to us and the house had cooperated beautifully once again. The new door opens and closes and locks like a charm and looks so much better than that old piece of junk that used to be in its place. Of course, we didn't get one inch of trim painted that day but such is life: project-hopping at its best.