Pantry Reno PART ONE

 I have been planning a pantry project for a while. When the hinges of the door finally gave up the ghost, I decided it was a sign to get going. First order of business was to expand the doorway a bit.

Before:

 Removed trim

 Took out door jamb

 Cut back drywall

 Made some exploration holes to figure out how to proceed

 Cut out what I could

 Trimmed the drwall from inside the closet

 Made a new header same as the previous one, just a bit longer. Oh, and empty the pantry finally. After I got dust all over everything first. Sometimes I just dive in and can't be bothered with the details.

 Patch drwall

 Cut back the studs from the floor

  And filled in with pieces of plywood...

 And extra flooring pieces to bring the height back up. I tried to replace the whole pieces of flooring (tongue and groove laminate) but it was not working. Plan B is to replace the WHOLE kitchen floor with tile. But that isn't happening right now for a variety of reasons. So plan c...

 ....make a threshold to cover the holes. It is a thin piece of wood painted the trim color. Glued and nailed down.

 Here are the pullouts I am going to use. Drawers I found at the ReStore for $1 each.

 Removed the contact paper, dusted, cleaned, primed them

 And then painted with a few coats of top coat---trim color. I am going to replace the contact paper with something else. The drawer bottoms are still tacky from the old contact paper and wouldn't paint well. Perhaps I will modpodge some pretty paper in or something. I don't know yet. Something wipeable.

 Finished drwall repairs, and painted walls.

 Trimmed the front

 To be continued.....

Master Bath, Start to Finish

Here is the master bath when we looked at the house (Dec 2007) Note that it is daytime and the bathroom is dark as night! It was a dark red/brown color. Terrible, dysfunctional medicine cabinets, hollywood light fixture, orange oakish cabinetry...

 We painted (Gobi Desert by Behr) and replaced the medicine cabinets first. I also moved the hand towel ring to between the mirrors instead of on the far right on your way out of the bathroom.

 Cabinets before: Oak, brass hardware, laminate countertops...

 Put granite in. (Feb 2011)

 Changed the laminate cabinet side to beadboard and replaced the tp holder. Then painted the cabinets and replaced all the hardware with brushed nickel.

 Before backsplash tile:

Added backsplash. May 2011 By the way, that tile was called "beige". Yeah, right.

Replaced light fixture. (Mar 2012)

Replaced vinyl flooring with tile. (May 2012) Tile is Mesa Beige from Lowe's.

 

Again, the before:

And the after! We are going to sell this house within a couple years so I tried to stay neutral to appeal to more people in general. If we were going to stay here forever, I might have made different choices but overall I am happy. It is obviously a huge improvement.

Master Bath Floor Tile part 2

 I don't have any pictures of the dry layout, but I totally recommend doing that. You don't want to have to make decisions or tricky cuts while your thinset is already mixed up. You want to be all ready to go when that stuff is ready.

I started at the far end of the room and worked my way out.

 Here is around the toilet. Make sure you have room to slide the toilet bolts back under the flange. I didn't consider it and barely had room. Whew! If I had an angle grinder or something I could fix it but I don't. So I got lucky.

 Not perfect, but pretty good considering I just used my wet saw to cut the curves. It will all be covered by the toilet anyway.

 Here is the tiles along the tub.

 Coming out of the bathroom. I was able to get 4 whole tiles across. And I never had to make any cuts small than half a tile.

I cleaned off any residual thinset on the tiles and got ready for grout.

 Grouting.

 Wiping off the grout.

Area grouted around the toilet.

The tile raised the height of the floor so a flange extender was needed. Plus I also used an "extra" thick wax ring to also compensate for the tile plus thinset.

Time to start putting baseboard back in. I used a 1x3 size. Cutting around the valve in the wall was tricky since it was round and I don't have the right tool to do that yet. My birthday is coming up, hint, hint.

More trim.

Might as well paint while I can....

I cut a hole for the heat register.

When putting the toilet in, you pretty much do the reverse as taking it out. And don't let your kids near the bathroom so they don't break the top to your toilet tank! Now I gotta find a new one!

I still need to paint the baseboards to match the cabinets and other trim and get a transition strip for the doorway but otherwise, it's done! Wahoo! And way better.