Friday, February 26, 2010

New Washer & Dryer

We finally broke down and bought a new washer and dryer. I started noticing a little bit of water on the pan below the washer and it was starting to make a loud squeaking noise occasionally.

We found a really good deal on the Maytag 5000 series set. This set uses steam in both the washer and dryer.


It was hell getting them up the stairs, especially the washer, it must weigh 3 times as much as our old washer. At each landing I had to remove the hand truck and reposition it because they were too big to turn on the landing. I also had to remove the door frame to the laundry room to get them in, there was literally no room on either side when I squeezed them in there. In the end it was worth it though, they are awesome. They use much less water and electricity, are super quiet, and clean great.

Monday, February 1, 2010

Upstairs bathroom is complete

Well for now anyways. I still have a few small things left to do like some caulking, I need to paint the ceiling and I'll probably put some crown up too. I also need to find a mirror or small medicine cabinet and a satin nickel towel bar and toilet paper holder. I also need a light fixture for the ceiling (there's a bare bulb there now) and possibly one above the sink. And I need to install the baseboards too, they will be travertine.

Here are a few pictures of the work done over the last few days.


Here is the room after the second sanding of the mud. The window in this room is in very bad shape. It wasn't built properly in the first place and now it's falling apart. I an going to completely rebuild the window in the spring or early summer but for now I'm just cleaning it up and putting some new casing on it.

Here's the new casing on the window.


Next I painted the room, we found another can of oops paint that was the perfect color and even better it's semi-gloss. After painting the room I began installing the plumbing for the fixtures.


Installing the sink faucet was a huge pain in the ass. First the center hole on the bowl was not big enough for the faucet to fit through. I had to grind it out with my dremel, the bits I had were very cheap and china is very hard so I went through about a bit a minute but I was finally able to enlarge the hole enough for it to fit.

So then I finally get the entire faucet together and realize that I need to take the handles back out to be able to bolt the bowl to the wall. Now with the bowl up against the wall there is almost no room to work so putting the handles back in took a while. The next issue is that there is so little room under the sink that it was very hard to install the braided hoses without them kinking. There are two that go from the faucet to the handles then two that go from the handles to the supply valves.

I finally got it all together, here is a pic of it.


I think it looks pretty good, by the way we got both this faucet and the shower kit on closeout for about $160 total.

Here are the rest of the bathroom pics.

Sink

Toilet with antique toilet seat


The completed window.. for now


I figured I'd add a picture or two of what this bathroom looked like originally.