home_improvement

1/ 07:

Last summer it became necessary for us to buy a new fridge. The one we got was a different shape from the old one, left us with a big space between it and the counter. Not only did it look a little....wrong, it was also wasted space which, if you live in a house the size of ours, is a major sin. So I thought it was the perfect size for one of these things. I measured and drew it out myself, and Preston took my measurements (a large leap of faith, because we both know I'm very bad at measuring for wood. I keep wanting to do things in yards instead of feet and inches, much to his amusement. Also I tend to forget that wood has three

The next project was to bring in the new tub. I insisted that we would have enough room to swing it round to fit in the old space, but of course I was wrong. We had already removed the dryer, but it just wasn't going to work. So we removed the left-side wall, which had been built in after the old tub had been installed. Still not enough room. There was no help for it, we had to remove the toilet. So once we got the tub in, we decided that this was a good time to put in the other toilet we had bought but never got around to installing. BUT before we did that, we had to fix the floor which for some reason had a sag in it where the toilet was. Well, if you're gonna go THAT far, might as well just lay a new floor, since the old one was pretty worn anyway? And hey, what about TILE?? So, off we went to Home Depot for tile and a tile saw. And some quick-setting cement to fix the floor. (Our bathroom is on a cement slab....or I should say it is now, before we fixed it it had wood under there as well.) This is what we found when we ripped up the floor:

out the door. Then we discovered that we would have to re-plumb the whole area, as the old tub's holes do not fall in the same place as the new tub. So he did some creative plumbing, resulting in such works of art as this one.

This is more Preston's page than mine, although I help (okay, mostly I get in the way. But I keep the tea coming, and I fetch things and hold the light.)

I thought I would put in some of the things we have made and done around the house; we have a very small house, with very little storage space so that presents some problems that require some creative thinking to solve, and I am lucky to have married a man who has yet to encounter something he can't either fix or come up with something better.

Recently we put down a new floor in our living room and kitchen; that was a project that needs its own page. Take a look!

The next thing I made him do was put

cabinets in the bathroom. We have sort

of a closet in there, but it's full and so

is the vanity so boxes of tissue and tp,

and the laundry soap and other stuff

end up getting put on the floor next to

the dryer or on top of it and the washer

and just makes the place look messy.

When I bought this cabinet at

Second Cents, it was actually one

cabinet that opened in the middle.

There was no place to put it, not enough

wall space, so Preston cut it in half and

made two cabinets out of it. I never

would have thought of that! Of course

he could have just made cabinets, but I saw this one and really liked it. I'm not wild about the green fabric, but that can be changed easily enough, it's just stapled on to the backs of the doors. I'm going to have to go to the remnant shop (oh, twist my arm!!) and get some new curtain fabric, and fabric for the cabinets....and the shower curtain. What a project this turned out to be!!!

It does need a knob though, but I will wait for that because I want all new knobs for my kitchen. I painted these myself a few years ago when we refinished the cabinets because I wanted them to match my Salmon Falls Pottery, but they are just wood with textured paint on them sprayed with acrylic sealer, and the paint is starting to wear off. What I need is to get some ceramic ones and paint them similarly and have them glazed and fired, so they will last.

8/07:

"Lets put tile on the walls behind the bathtub, what do you think?" says Preston. I think, great idea. I love tile. And the walls behind the tub, after 20 years of constant moisture, were to say the least disgusting. And un-cleanable, as they were falling apart. So off we went to Home Depot.

We had figured on about $50 for tile. Well by the time we got the tile, the backer board, the thinset, the grout, the spacers, and a TILE SAW, because it's cheaper to buy one than to rent one if you can make any sense of that, we were up to $250. For that price, we discovered, you can get one of those all-in-one tubs with walls, you know the fiberglass ones. And that way we get rid of the ugly blue/green bathtub. So we opted to go that way. Here's what it looked like when the walls behind the tub were ripped down. I would have taken a pic before, but Preston dived into that bathroom with a hammer and crowbar so fast that I didn't have time to get my camera!

Anyway, the next step was to remove the old tub, which is cast iron and weighs more than my car. There were only two of us home, so that was a challenge. We finally managed to wedge it out of there and onto a dolly and

dimensions to account for, unlike fabric which for all intent and purpose is two- dimensional.) and built this fantastic contraption. It holds plenty of cans and leaves my cupboards free for boxes of cereal and tea and the like, which

before now were shoved in every which way in with the pans and dishes. It has wheels on the bottom, and if you do this yourself you should use the stationary wheels, not the swivel ones.