Doors

Wellington Palace has one of those circular layouts, where you can run laps from the formal living room, out to the front hallway, through the den, down the galley kitchen, back into the formal living room.  There are large openings between the kitchen and the den,  the den and the front hallway, and the living room and the front hallway. Then, for some unknown reason, there is a door between the kitchen and the formal living room. I guess so you can hide the dirty dishes from guests? It even has a lock on it, which makes zero sense, since you can just walk around the den to the other side of the door. Who knows.

Here's what I know. My fluffernugget is old. 

She's going on 17 this year. And old dogs are a lot less likely to be able to wait for you to get home and let them out after you work 14 hours in a day. The living room is carpet, and let's just say we like to keep her out of there. We've been doing this with a baby gate.

While this is a perfectly serviceable solution, it's not terribly pretty. We also had to take it down whenever we had certain wheelchair bound family members over for Christmas and Thanksgiving, and it's really a huge pain to move. So I had the idea for a sliding barn door. There's a great expanse of open space on either side of the entrance into the living room, and... sue me. I think they're cool. 

My wonderful family knew of my ambition and not only did they buy me the sliding door hardware that I had my eye on, but they also snagged two antique french doors for $40 via craigslist. You can see them languishing in my garage gathering dust in my last post. 

Because they bought me both in 2017. And I haven't gotten around to installing them. So when I basically became unemployed due to Covid, I decided Lucas was right. In the immortal words of the Doors, the time to hesitate is through.

First I installed a header over the opening. That way I wouldn't have to futz with getting the rail into the studs. Also, the hardware I bought has holes every 500 millimeters, which is not 16 inches on center, not that my studs are remotely where they're supposed to be to begin with. This just made everything easier. I marked out the studs on the wall and made sure to put two screws into each stud for the header. 

This was the project that made me replace that tiny light in the hall. 

Next I had to prep the doors. I intend to lightly sand them and paint them a nice soft white color. But the second I started sanding large swaths of paint started peeling off - like baseball sized chunks. And I just couldn't stick to my original plan. For two reasons: 1. if I painted over such poorly adhered paint, it was just gonna peel and take the new paint with it. and 2. The wood underneath was too pretty to cover up. So I ended up spending a week stripping the doors. 

I really did not intend to do this. I hate stripping wood. I know I do it a lot for someone who claims to hate it, but sometimes the wood wants what the wood wants. 

As an aside, they have changed the formula for Citristrip. It used to smell almost pleasant and look like a peach smoothie. Now it smells like burning rubber and looks like orange Fanta. It still works, but it is much less pleasant to work with. 

The doors had two other small issues. They were not tall enough. I really needed an 84" door, and these were 80". I solved this by planing a 2x4 to the appropriate thickness on my husband's coworker's planer in return for some homemade cookies, and attaching sections of it to the bottom of each door with 4" screws and lots of glue. That's why the bottoms are painted with a cool racing stripe. I used wood filler to make it look more like one piece of wood. 

The other issue was some fairly serious wood rot in one of the doors. I initially attempted to use regular wood filler to fix this. I knew from the onset that this was unlikely to work. 

There was just far too much rotted out wood for this. I ended up using Bondo wood filler. At some point, Bondo realized that people were using their automotive body filler to repair broken wood furniture, and they reformulated it to be stainable. It's a two part epoxy wood filler that stinks to high heaven, but it's hard as a rock in 15 minutes. You can sand it, you can stain it (though it takes stain differently than wood) and you can even screw into it. I didn't, because I didn't trust it that much. 

To use it, I wrapped a piece of duct tape around the part of the door that was rotted away to mimic where the edges of the door would have been. Then I filled it with the stinky goo. You've got to work quick, it only has about 5 minutes of working time. When it was set up hard I sanded it smooth, and it was actually harder and denser than the pine 2x4 I screwed next to it. Seriously.

I also filled in the holes left after I removed the original door knob hardware. After a painstaking process of sanding and painting, I had two doors of the appropriate size with a nice yellow stripe at the bottom. I actually hung the doors upside down because the bottoms were a nice solid place to screw in my hardware. 

I didn't take pictures of the next part because it was a gigantic pain the rear and I was doing good just to get it done. We hung the rail (which was very long) and made sure it was PERFECTLY LEVEL. It is a very heavy steel rail. This was not fun. At that point we were free to attach the hardware to the doors and hang them.

At this point I turned my attention to the original door knobs. The first rule of restoration is, it probably hasn't been cleaned in 50 years. So I took some barkeeper's friend to the door plates and knobs. 

That my friends is nearly 100 years of hand gunk. Go clean your doorknobs. That was seriously all it took to make these beauties shine again. I used some JB Weld steelstik to attach hanger bolts to the actual knobs. It's a two part epoxy that is kind of like play dough. You knead it until it is all one color and you've got about 5 minutes to stick two things together. I crammed a bit inside the knobs and shoved in the hanger bolt. Then I drilled a pilot hole in the doors where I wanted the knobs to be, slipped the door plates through the hanger bolt, and screwed the knobs on by hand. 

I may decide later that the obvious spot where the filler is covering the hole from the original door knob hardware bothers me, and cover it up somehow. But for now, I'm ok with it. 

These doors look so much better than a baby gate, they're easier to operate, and they don't have to be removed if I want to move furniture in or out, or if someone needs to come in via wheelchair. Now, my formal living room has a door at both entrances, and it offers a tiny bit of privacy when this room doubles as a guest room. And it only took two and a half years to pull it off. 

Garage Shelves

If you're an avid reader of my blog, which means you're probably my mother, you'll remember that I have this odd belief that garages are meant to house cars. I'm pretty insistent that I can actually put a car in my garage. In the case of Wellington Palace, and our two car garage, I have this bizarre idea that we should be able to get two cars into it. And yet, a girl needs a place to handy.

So when I came across the Ryobi Nation Dream Workshop, which manages to fit a table saw and a miter saw into a 24 inch deep space at the side of a garage, well, I was off to the hardware store. 

This design calls for two by fours and some plywood, and I'm pretty sure it's older than cars. I left a gap in the middle for my miter saw. You'll see why in a minute. There's a nice place on the end for my lovely new drill press that was a very generous Christmas gift from my brother and sister in law.

The lower areas were left strategically empty to the 36 inch mark. This area will be filled with four rolling carts, two housing power tools, two serving as  a workbench of sorts. The tops of which will all be the same height. I got the plans over at Ryiobi Nation. They called for the carts to be made out of 1/2" plywood. So that's what I used. 

 I built the one for my table saw first. And it sucked. It wobbled. It was not remotely stable. The pocket holes were too shallow and the whole thing felt shoddily constructed. This is not what you want in a cart housing one of the most dangerous power tools on the market. So after that I switched to 3/4" MDF. And I eventually remade this cart. MDF doesn't have the gaps on it's edge that cheap plywood does, which made all the pocket holes more solid. And my pocket hole jig really isn't designed to deal with anything less than 3/4" material. It'll do it, just... not well.

Notice that the miter saw is taller than the other carts. There's no way to lower the miter saw when it isn't in use like the table saw. That's why there's a gap in the shelving. The carts are constructed such that the top of the table saw is the same height as the work surface of the table saw, and the other two carts are the same height as both to those. What this means is that my two work surface carts can act as supports for work materials on either of my power tools. Which means I have to pull Husband away from his computer to hold something I'm cutting a lot less. And we both like that. 

 I plan on eventually putting some drawers into the empty spaces in the carts for storage. Because you can never have too much storage. Right now the shelf just to the left of my miter saw is crammed with hand held power tools, hand tools, drill bits, sawdust, jigs, and other trappings of handying. Hopefully in the future I can sort my tools out neatly into labeled drawers so I don't end up spending 30 minutes looking for my speed square and can get straight to the part where I'm building things. In the mean time, I tossed a pegboard on the wall to hold some of my hand tools where I can see them at a glance. Hopefully that'll help me answer the important questions in life. Like why do I own so many hammers?

Plans for the garage shelves and all of the carts can be found at Ryobi Nation.

Lights and Mirrors

I hate working in the dark. So much so that I once put a chandelier in my garage. If I'm working on darned near anything and I'm not out in the full sun, chances are I have on my stylish head lamp. I've been working on a not-yet-complete project in my front hallway where I had a single bulb under a heavy opaque shade. It has always been dark in that hallway and I've always hated it. But the lamp shade is so pretty that I have struggled with the decision to replace it.

And then Husband casually said "If you were going to replace it, what would you replace it with?" In my world that's basically permission to rip something down. But we were kind of in the middle of a pandemic and my favorite lighting shop, you guessed it, Bart's Barn, was very closed. I went to Home Depot and took pictures of every lighting fixture I liked. I did the same at Lowes. I made a pinterest board. I obsessed about what lighting fixture I would get. But I didn't buy anything because lighting fixtures are anywhere between $80 and $300 new and they're like $15 at Bart's. I displayed patience in epic proportions. 

Yesterday, Bart's reopened. 

That price tag says $25, but it was also half off. So, $13 later, here we are. I hung it from a cup hook in my garage shelves to paint it. Cause there is no way I'm keeping that early 90's brass in my house. 

I kept the bulbs in while I painted because these are incandescents and I was going to replace them with LEDs and it saved me having to tape the insides of the fixtures. There is a central bulb at the bottom that got stuffed with old grocery store plastic bags and taped up. And so, we paint!

This color is called flat soft iron and it's the same color I used when I spray painted the doorknobs in most of the house and drawer pulls in the bathrooms. It gives the house a bit of consistency. Another thing I've learned to do as I've matured. 

Voila! It was actually very simple to install. We got it up on the first try with no expletives. 

Another way I fight dark corners in my house is with mirrors. I love mirrors. And while we were at Barts, I found two cute little mirrors to add to my mirror collection. I was actually looking for a desk. I didn't find a desk. So when we left Bart's we ran over to Goodwill to see if they had any furniture. I still did not find a desk. But I did find a gigantic beveled glass mirror. For $12. Which is the same as I paid for one of my cute little tiny mirrors at Bart's. 

I do not understand Goodwill. They price things ridiculously low. I'm not complaining. But it's like they don't want furniture in their store and they price it stupid low to get rid of it ASAP. I think that's why they rarely have any decent furniture. They've got tons of stuff right now, because they continued to take collections while everyone was stuck in their houses in the pandemic. Lots of people went Marie Kondo on their spaces when they were forced to stay in them. 

Anyway. Mirror.

I started by getting the picture wire off the back of the mirror. This thing is like, 25 pounds. We're not in picture wire territory here. There's even a note on the back saying not to use it. 

And yet, that is want was holding this bad boy up. So I first got some painter's tape and spaced out the D rings on the back of the mirror. 

Then I marked a level line on the wall and moved the tape to the wall. Using the marks on the tape, I drilled a couple of holes in the wall for my heavy duty molly bolts. These things will each hold 75 pounds. This mirror isn't coming out of the wall. 

Husband helped me hang the huge mirror and then went back to his spaceship game on the computer. For the smaller mirrors in my collection I used these curved drywall hook thingies. 

I like them a lot. You just push them into the wall where you want them to be. Due to their curved shape they press against the backside of the wall and are perfectly good for hanging lightweight items like diplomas or family photos or small mirrors. They take all of 6 seconds to learn how to use. When they're in this is all you see. 

I just eyed the placement because all the mirrors are different sizes, and in about four minutes, I had them all up in a neat little collage worthy of HGTV. 

Now I just need to find the windex. 

Pandemic Pandemonium

Wow. It's been five years. A lot has happened. I've gotten married. I changed careers. I had back surgery. It would seem that Handy Mandy went into hibernation for a while. Ever since I started my new business it seems like I haven't had a moment to work on my house. And the 1965 Wellington Palace has needed some help. But when you own a business, particularly one that operates primarily on the weekend, well, there isn't a lot of time to straighten out a 55 year old fixer upper.

But then the world turned upside down.

We closed our business on March 16th, 2020, because I got Covid 19. And we haven't reopened due to state mandates, and, obviously, for the health and safety of our customers. Thankfully, I seem to have been the lucky recipient of a milder form of the disease, and have recovered. It was still not very fun. 1/10, definitely would not recommend.

And when I recovered I went a little bit stir crazy. And well, Handy Mandy came out of hibernation.

Our living room had original 1965 faux wood paneling everywhere. And I kind of randomly started tearing out walls. I know what a lot of you are thinking. "Man I'm glad I'm not married to that crazy woman." I'm betting at least once my husband wished he wasn't either.

Most of the walls had drywall behind the paneling but I think when they were doing the house they kind of... ran out of drywall. And instead of getting more, they just did this one wall of crazy patches, and then left the garage wall without any.

Bonus points if you can tell what movie I watched while I tore out walls. 

There was also some neat water damage in the laundry wall where the washer used to leak. The washer got fixed, but the lovely mold was left behind, since it was hidden behind paneling. So we ripped all of that out and went to studs.

Now here, I cheated. I was still pretty weak from Covid and not in the mood to hang full sheets of drywall. So I called my contractor. He rocked out an awesome job hanging up the drywall for me in one morning. I finished up the taping and bedding. 

And then I sanded. And mudded. And sanded. And mudded. I wanted smooth walls without a texture on them. I don't like orange peel. And what I really should have done was put a skim coat over the whole wall. 

But I didn't. 

If I'm being honest I did a pretty crappy job of taping and bedding, even though I did 3 coats. I could have done a lot better job. But at one point I was just over it. I wanted to paint and move on with my life. And I more or less decided that most people wouldn't notice my crappy job, and I was going to hang artwork on the walls anyway. And I went with it. 

Ages ago I ripped the paneling off the little wall by the kitchen to see what was underneath, and how hard it would be to redo the walls, and I painted it a nice neutral gray green, that I'm pretty sure I mixed myself from other buckets of used paint. I've discovered as I've matured that if you paint the walls a neutral color you can put wacky colors on your furniture without making people's heads spin. It's my new M.O. So I went to home depot and brought home every single color swatch they had and managed to find one that was actually almost a dead on match. 

It's a bit lighter than the original, but with the fire place being where it is, between this wall and any other wall, you can't visually tell the difference. So we painted. 

I tend to do the cutting in and Husband is very handy with a roller. When we start at the same time, we generally finish within 20 minutes or so of one another. 

Sometimes I leave him a little note to cover up.


Since we had moved all the furniture and taken off all the switch plates and outlet covers, we decided this would be a good time to rewire everything with nice white outlets and switches. This is a pretty cheap swap if you can do it yourself. I think we spent less than $20 for five switches and four outlets. This is what passes for quality time in our house. Also, headlamps are super convenient, especially when all your breakers are turned off. I think we'll start a new fashion.

Next we replaced all our crown molding. We paid a bit extra to get stainable pine crown molding and I managed to match the stain on our kitchen cabinets exactly. I figured, I had done a 3000 square foot business in baseboards, crown molding couldn't be that much more difficult. Nothing a couple of youtube videos couldn't sort out.

Let me tell you something. Crown molding is hard. Much harder than baseboards. Way harder. There were some expletives. There was a lot more "Amanda cut this wrong so we have to do it again." We removed at least four pieces of trim to try to get them to fit in better. And there was just enough waste that I had to go buy an extra piece because I ran out. Which meant two coats of stain and one of poly, and waiting overnight for it to dry before I could even attempt to cut it.

There were tears.

But you know what? I'm thinking of adding crown to the dining room. So it couldn't have been that bad right?

Anyway it looks great. And I had enough left over to make this nifty coat rack.

And I got a bit coat rack crazy. I found this gorgeous piece of scrap wood in my pile in the garage, and after a bit of sanding, I slapped a nice edge on it with my router. 

Someone had painted that. Who does that? What is wrong with people? Anyway. It made a great coat rack for the back door. 

Thanksgiving

Hey folks. Handy Mandy here. Sorry to leave you guys hanging like that. I've been a bit busy lately. You guys remember Boyfriend?

Ever elusive

Well, there have been a lot of upgrades in the Handy Mandy household over the years, but this is perhaps the most exciting. Boyfriend has been upgraded.

To Fiancé.

The furball and I have moved out of Casita Amanda, into the luxurious Wellington Palace. It's roughly twice the square footage and boasts 8, count them 8 walk in closets. I think my days of wandering around trying to squeeze just a bit more storage out of a tiny house may be done. Casita Amanda, or the Lunar Module, as we must now call it, has a tenet. I'll get around to posting the conclusion of the bathroom reno sometime, don't worry. And Wellington Palace has plenty of projects that need doing as well, so fear not, Handy Mandy isn't going anywhere.

So let's talk about Thanksgiving. It's my very favorite holiday, and this is the first year that I get to host at my house for all my family on Thanksgiving. That's going to include two parents, one brother, a pair of parents-in-law, a pair of step-parents-in-law, a pair of siblings-in-law, two friends and one friend parent. Toss in me and Fiancé, and you've got 14 people. 

I have exactly 12 dining room chairs. 

So, where do we turn in our hour of need but to Ruth's Room! This Bart's Barn spin off hosts furniture, books, clothing, knick knacks and other thrift store finds. And the proceeds of course benefit Habitat for Humanity. 

They don't look like much yet, but give me time.

I actually purchased these around this time last year, thinking they'd fit great in Fiancé's bedroom for the purpose of putting on shoes. He was dubious. They cost ten bucks.

I turned them over and removed the seats, which were held on by a couple screws.

Then I ripped off the fabric and what passed as cushioning. 

You can tell these were probably originally upholstered in the late 50's/early 60's in gold, and reupholstered in the late 70's/early 80's in paisley. Ew.

At this point I reupholstered the seats using two inch high density foam (I like a cushy tushy) and some plaid to match Fiancé's curtains and bedspread. I thought I took pictures of this but, I guess I didn't. 

cushy tushy.

Then I sanded and restained the chair frames.

Then it's a matter of screwing the seats back to the chair. Which was harder than you'd imagine. I suggest sitting in a chair and putting the seat upside down in your lap. Then line up the frame and screw them together.

Yes I'm in pajama bottoms and slippers. Don't judge. 

I lost the screws for the seat in the move and had to replace them with new wood screws. But if that's the only thing I lost during the move I'm ok with that.

Here we are, good as new, ready for Thanksgiving duty!

Now all I have to do is figure out how to feed 14 people.

Puppy Tax!