So this actually took place some time ago – about 4 months ago, I believe. Nevertheless, I haven’t documented it yet, and I am rather please with the results. The idea for a sliding door came to me several years ago. The door into the bathroom took up a majority of the space when swinging inwards, and it always hit the toilet. Apparently, DC row homes originally had wall mounted toilet tanks, which have smaller footprint on the floor plan. Or so I was told. Dunno how much truth there is in it, but it sounds a plausible explanation.

Regardless, the door opening into the bathroom was clumsy at best, so I found a company that sells sliding door hardware [Johnson Hardware, out of Elkhart, IN]. Because I had already refinished the bathroom with wall tile, I didn’t want to get into the guts of the wall for a pocket door. So I purchased a lightweight wall mount sliding kit.

With a little drywall, the mount kit, and various tools to refinish the original trim, I was in business.

Post demo, pre refinishing

Now, there was a fair amount of damage to the original plaster, so I took that out some loney weekend in the distant past. I lived with the exposed wall for at least 8 months. Cool and edgy at first… then just an daily reminder of work unfinished.

But, on a not so lonely weekend in the not do distant past, we decided that tackling this wall and the door mount would be an a good weekend task.

Mounting the sliding door hardware

Nothing is as easy as it seems, and there was a bit of engineering involved in out-setting the hardware so that it would pass smoothly over the existing door molding. No prob. I happened to have three blocks of cherry wood left over from the shelving endeavor which where the perfect thickness, and much less obtrusive than a two x four.  A little bonus was that I was able to validate my purchase of a drill press, which was used to place the mounting holes in the hardware itself.  Mounting the rail on the wall wasn’t quite as easy, given the amount of pressure I needed to apply, the angle i was approaching from, and the absolute lack of leverage I had. I vaguely remember sweating my ass off during this endeavor.

The original door is mounte, and now sliding freely

The other thing I was looking for in the slide mount was to keep the original door, and as much of the old feel as possible.

Starting to paint the walls

Painting finsihed... debating cutting a box to cover the mount

Pardon the language. But my 7 grand worth of GE appliances is about to get a fourth repair in 4 years. Sure they’re nice and shiny… but I would trade that for reliability at this point. Each of the three appliances has broken at least once, and this is the second go-round for my dishwasher. Sigh. To be honest, I don’t know if any brand woulda been better – I paid a fair amount, but I clearly didn’t go top of the heap, nor did I go cheap and reliable.

But that doesn’t stop me from being pissed that sh*t keeps breaking. I’ve got more than enough on my plate without watching dished stack up, and pulling half cooled food out of my fridge.

And that’s my complaint of the day.

After a day in the sun playing soccer, Sunday was time to get down to business on the second bedroom. It’s been in the works for some time – the cork flooring in the dressing room has been laid, I re-plastered a section that was damaged years ago when I was demo-ing the adjacent bathroom, and two thirds of the walls have been painted. By Sunday, it was time to cut and place the trim for both sections of the bedroom.

The amount of polish well cut trim adds to a room is extremely gratifying. And, thankfully, not that difficult. It was, in fact, for more taxing to clean the room and clear out all of the tools. And equally gratifying.

The one draw back to the work as it nears what I anticipated to be “complete”, is that there’s always a few new tasks that just beg to be done. I notice the sloppiness of some trim work by previous owners – I notice chips in the paint left by removing the old fittings. The floor, which I had decided not to refinish until I sell the house at a much later date, now bothers the hell out of me.

For the time being, I’ll have to live with these concessions. There are now two other areas that are in much more dire need of attention. Seeing how good the refinished trim looks in the second bedroom, I realize that taking the same approach in the foyer and landing will dramatically improve the feel of the house.

As the upstairs comes to a close, I have a strong desire to purge most of the shit I’ve accumulated over the last couple years. Hopefully I’ll find time this week to at least gather up the shit I don’t need or want anymore.

Mia Jones and my old friend Scott Hollingsworth invited Lauren and I over for the World Cup final today. Apparently, it was Mia’s ambition to fatten us all up for the kill. Tons of food, all quite good, follwoed by Lauren’s homemade Peach Pie. The game went as expected – and if a bit anticlimatic, it was a good afternoon spent eating, drinking beer and flapping our lips.

None of this particularly helped finish off the second bedroom, which is nearing it’s final stages. After a post-beer coffee shop run, it became clear that it was far too early for bed, and far too late to start anything major. Which of course led to me starting something major – like laying the cork flooring in the second bedroom’s sunroom. We managed to get all of the more complex cuts out of the way tonight, so that tomorrow it’s a straight march back into the main section of the bedroom.

Lauren thankfully took “before” photos of the sunroom, so we’ll have something to show for our work, mid to late week…. I hope.

A side note: 12 miles this AM keeps me on track for marathon training schedule.

It’s seems like every time I write a post, I’m apologizing (to know one really) for a lack of updates. On this rainy Saturday morning I’ve decided to take the opportunity to finally post some photos from the last nine month of renovation, gardening, and reorganizing.

My first thought was to take a brute force approach to this retrospective. It seemed like uploading all of my photos to flickr and then using some wordpress plugin to pull them in would be a clever way to catch up in a tic.

After 30 minutes of looking for a plug-in I liked, and poking around the theme files for this site, it was beginning to feel a bit too much like work. The last thing I want to do is spend Saturday morning re-coding an plug-in I wrote on bus commutes two years ago… wait second to last thing… the laaast thing I want to do is dive into the markup for the site and implement all of the interactive pieces I planned out when I built v-house.

So my new approach is to upload a shitload of pictures, in no particular order, with enough captioning for context. I’ll get to breaking them out into posts later. I look at this as forgoing the barriers to writing. When I sit down to write a post, I waste most of my time looking for photos, resizing, cropping. Something always comes up, and the posts just don’t get done.

Putting up the mortar for the backsplash - the tile sat in the basement for nearly 3 years

The tile is up... now to grout

Almost done... obsessing on the clean up of the grout.

Many a month has passed, and I have loads of pictures and videos. The house is coming along… however, that will have to wait. For the meantime, I’ll just pass along a couple pics of the coffee table Lauren and I built a couple weekends ago. Short story is that we say a mid century table we liked that cost $375… a few moments inspection of the piece led us to believe we could build it a a day or two. Here you are:

So it’s taken my 9 months to post the pictures… but I did indeed survive. But you can tell who trained and who didn’t. Look close.

That’s not a smile on my face.

But I did make it, and I was under 4 hours.

So that’s the before. Just happy I could find the picture after 9 months. I’ll come back to say something approximating cleverness at a later date. For now, that’s me in disbelief at 5:30am.

Hmmm. So it’s been quite a while since I’ve dusted off the key board and written anything about the house. Guess what….I’m not gonna write about the house tonight either. The kitchen shelves are coming slowly, and a few odd tasks have gotten finished. But truthfully the house is a damn mess. Power tools and pizza boxes. Dirty clothes tossed to the bottom of the basement stairs – dishes in desperate need of a washing.

The house has been temporarily put on hold for

• the new job (now three months old)
• late preparation for the Chicago marathon

Well the race is here. I don’t feel ready in the least, and it’s cold here in Chicago. But I’m still a bit excited to see what the story is with running a marathon. So here we go. 12 hours from now. I should be well and truly into the 2009 Chicago Marathon.

-w