Saloon no more!

A week or so ago I bought replacement doors for the guest bedroom (a.k.a Mum and Dad's room) at the cottage. We didn't get a chance to install them last weekend, so we (the royal we again) got to work on them this weekend.

Here's what the doors used to look like, for reference:

It was a good weekend for getting things done. Right after we arrived a severe thunderstorm rolled through. It scared the pants off me! I'm pretty sure lightning struck the island, it was so loud. You could hear the hissing before the massive crack of thunder.

Anywho. After the thunderstorm the temperatures dropped like a stone. It was overcast, cool, and breezy for the rest of the weekend. We were perfectly content to hide out indoors and get some things done.

First the old doors had to come out and the new doors had to be unpacked. We opted to go with hinged bifold doors (with the hinges removed) again. Why?

A: because everything in this cottage is unhinged already, so why break with tradition?!
B: because a full door would open too far into the hallway would be an impediment. The room would get too hot if the door had to stay shut all the time.

So, I bought a 30" bifold (track included - even though we didn't use it) for about $48, I think. New, at Lowes. The six-panel style matched the door on our room across the hall.

Once the doors were roughly fit into the opening (and I say "roughly". Nothing about that door jamb is square or even straight, for that matter.), Dad marked the location for the hinges, and set about chiseling out a spot for the hinge on the side of the door.

Then they hung it up.

With both doors hung we realized they wouldn't close! Although the opening is 30" top and bottom, there's a wow in the door-jamb about halfway down that narrows the opening. Dad had to take one of the doors out to the deck and carve off 1/8" down the length of it with the skil saw.

The doors fit well after that, and closed properly. They still look wonky, because the door jamb is so darned crooked. But, they look better than the saloon doors, are more private, and the hallway looks tidier.

We still need to pick up more/better handles because the the screws for the current ones are too short (we knew they would be - they're meant for thinner cabinet doors) and we forgot to account for having handles both inside the doors, and out. Looks better, no?

Leveling Mt. Kilimanjaro

We finally got around to "fixing" the hump in the middle of the guest bedroom floor. It used to look like this (click to view close up):

Mum stubbed her toe on that ridge every time she moved around the bed to make it.

images stolen from interwebs

One way to level a woopsy floor is with self-levelling cement, a viscous compound that flows across the floor and settles into the deep spots, thus levelling it.

If we used self-levelling cement at the lodge, I think the front windows would be a foot deep in concrete before we hit level. (sigh).

Plan B was Dad's clever scheme.
Using his table-saw at home, he ripped 2x2 boards into decreasing thicknesses: 2", 1-1/2", 1", etc. These were screwed to the floor forming a grid.

Like this.

Then they covered the grid with three-quarter-inch plywood and screwed that down.

Until it looked like this.

Once the sub-floor was in, the vinyl flooring could be installed.

I think it's high time I approached Coke about sponsoring my blog. It seems like I've got a can of Coke Zero next to me in just about every work shot!

The guest room floor is now mostly level. The only downside to the process is that there's now a small step up into that bedroom (about an inch and a half tall), but that's been fitted with some nice trim so at least it looks good.

Fan

I felt a little useless this past week at the cottage. While the gents were whacking, smashing, swearing, and requesting bandaids, I found idle time to read three novels, putter a bit in the gardens, and even have the odd afternoon nap. It was really... really... weird. Nice, but weird.

I began to feel awful about getting nothing accomplished (How sad is it that I felt guilty for relaxing at the cottage? ), so I decided to install the new ceiling fan we picked up for the guest bedroom.

You may (or may not) know that I'm a mild-mannered* technical writer by day.

Reading badly written installation instructions incenses me. Steam spews from my ears. Profanities spill from my mouth. My left hand twitches in search of a red pen. When I get instructions like "Loosen jam screws on downrod" and neither "jam screws" or "downrod" are labelled in the handy-dandy parts diagram, I contemplate marking up their instructions with corrections and sending them back to the manufacturer. Then I wonder if there's a business model in that: marking up parts of their instructions, and sending them back a page or two holding the rest for ransom. If they want to pay for my editing services, I'll send them the rest of the cleaned up manual. I could make a killing!

This is what happens when I have too many naps. My brain isn't tired enough to dismiss this sort of nonsense post-haste.

Once the jam screws and downrod were identified and, as appropriate, loosened, and once I essentially gave up on the instructions and figured the rest out in spite of them, the fan was installed (with murettes and properly affixed ground wires, thankyouverymuch). I have no photos of the actual installation because I am the photographer, and the photographer's hands happened to be full of fan at the time.

As evidenced in this photo, the installation was a success! The fan goes, the light turns on.

Are ceiling fans pretty? Heck. No. But they're a godsend when it's stinky hot out and you have no AC.

Oh, and if you're wondering why it looks like the fan is pulling out of the ceiling, it's because the numbnuts that installed the ceiling (strapping/tiles) left almost no clearance for the octagon box, so it isn't sitting flush with the ceiling tiles. It's securely anchored in the ceiling (dad hung off it just to be sure), but it sticks out a bit. Consequently the fan canopy is flush with the octagon box, but not the ceiling. Stupid.

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*no, not really. Mild-mannered, that is.

Guest room

Q: What could possibly be more satisfying than finishing the clean up and redecoration of a room at the cottage?

A: Having someone else clean it up and redecorate it for you!

That's exactly what happened for me over the Canada Day week/weekend. Due to dance competition scheduling [insert much gnashing of teeth] we were unable to enjoy Canada Day at the cottage but Mum and Dad headed up and got a few things sorted out without us. While Dad got the first few sections of his Verra Nice Dock™ installed, mom went to work clearing out, washing down, and painting the "Guest bedroom", which really, let's be honest, is their bedroom.

Here's what it used to look like:

Do you suppose that cowboy artwork is hung at gallery height? (maybe if you're a giant) And those Early Bordello curtains... Eeeeee. Sadly, the lamps were excluded from the sale of the cottage, so they weren't present when we took possession. Darn.

Mom and Dad found a few warts once they cleared the room out. The window sill was seriously off-square and the floor has a major ridge running across it where two sections of cottage (there were at least two additions to the original cottage) meet. Unfortunately, the ridge was hidden under the bed so we didn't know about it until all the furniture came out.

These are the moments I dread most -  the peeling back of layers before we can rebuild - because invariably there's an unexpected problem uncovered that results in considerably more work to fix. My teeth are ground down to stubs.

Dad has a grand plan to mend the floor (involved tearing out the subfloor, repairing the floor joists to lower that section of the ridge, and shimming up the other low spots). He's a brave man. I am so grateful to have his help, wisdom, experience, and courage on this renovation project. Without his knowledgeable consulting, we'd probably have turned a blind eye to some of the more daunting repairs and the place wouldn't look as good.

Barring the repairs to the floor, here's what the room looks like now:

There was one poor choice made with the paint in this room. I thought I would save Mom some painting time by having her use Behr (Home Depot) "1-coat" paint. It's supposed to be a primer and a paint in one. It's junk though. J-U-N-Q-U-E, Junk! The paint is too thin; even after two coats of paint (and a gallon can that is completely empty) the walls still aren't adequately covered. It's disappointing. In retrospect, I should've just stuck with the tried and true Benjamin Moore paint and the KILLZ primer. At least it's not that noticeable when the room is full of stuff. (anyone who comments on it gets handed a roller and a fresh can of paint - you've been warned!)

Dad built a pretty headboard for the bed (which we thought was a full, but discovered it's a queen - pity, because it crowds the room a bit) out of some lumber and some scrap nasty tree panelling from cottage. Mom had an old blue and white quilt and some lace curtains that were taking up closet space at home. And I hope you recognize the Fat-Man-at-the-Buffet pillows I made from cottage scraps. Don't they fit nicely in this room? Mom also donated a lovely framed picture of a ghost and his boat.

Mom recycled the dresser that was in that room and painted it the same blue that's in the quilt.

I gave them the scruffy old 6-paned window that's been sitting in my storage closet in the basement, and Dad put some new mirrors into the panes. They still need to paint the drawer handles black and install them and we still need to sort out the flooring for that room, but it's already looking so much better!

Buried treasure?

While futzing about with the saloon doors to their bedroom, Dad decided to pull the panels of.... panelling off the back of the doors.

Here's what they looked like. Panel-y. In the photo, the doors are actually upside down. That's important for later on.

Once he removed the first panel, he got a bit of a surprise.

It's a carved pineapple panel!

And you know, I  kinda like it. Pineapples (at least in decor) are symbols of welcome, or hospitality.

I wonder why it's upside down in the door? I wonder why they covered it up!?

Oh. That's why.

Where, on earth, do you find two equal sized, similarly carved, yet entirely different wood panels to build doors out of!? (If you say "your cottage" I'm going to drop an anvil on your head).

*boggle*

Well, I know what to do with these.

*sigh*