Closet

Much to the chagrin of my female friends who demanded we keep the large mirrored doors, lest they have no way of making themselves presentable, we removed them and replaced them with real doors. You have to admit, it looks a lot more cottage-y than mirrors with brown metal trim. We're going with black hardware and black pulls.

Winter pics

Just thought I'd post a few winter pics from over the weekend. I wish there was time to enjoy the winter sports in all that snow. Lots of cross country skiers and snowshoers out and about. There apparently was a big dentist convention there this past weekend.

The Lantern

Jay and our friend, Tomas, attempt to install a light in the living room.

Appliances - a bump in the road

In all those flipping shows, there's always some unexpected problems that arise. For us, our first hiccup was when we put in the appliances which, for the most part, looked great:
When we ordered the appliances from Home Depot, we knew the exact widths and heights we needed. What we didn't check, was the depth:
We discovered the old fridge was counter-depth, about 25 inches, and our new fridge was 32 inches, so it stuck out into the doorway. It wasn't the worst thing in the world, but it really cut into the kitchen entrance, and noticeably dominated the kitchen. We could pay over 3K for a counter-depth, but we decided to call the resort's property manager, who also does contract work, to see if he could knock out the wall to bring the fridge back a few inches. Thanks to him, this problem was quickly resolved:

Here, you see the hole that was cut out between the foyer and kitchen to provide space for the fridge. While you see the back of the fridge now in the foyer, this will later be covered by plywood and a stone wall.
Now the fridge looks much better in the kitchen:You might also notice the wood trim on the melamine cupboards are black. Grant suggested we antique them until we get around to changing them - they do look a lot better.

Cupboards before:

Cupboards after:

Foyer & The Joys of Slate Tiles

The next job we tackled was the foyer. It was boring and bland with porcelain tiles and white walls:
Here, Jay discusses what he'd like to do:


First item on the list was removing the tiles which we removed from the both the foyer and kitchen. The tiles themselves weren't too difficult but scraping the mortar was terrible. We won't do this again without power tools.

Jay had the job of measuring the tile cuts - an exacting job that I don't really like. So I was left wearing a plastic bag and freezing on the balcony cutting the tiles with a wet saw. It's pretty laughable but this is our reality in all its bare-bones form.

There's a lot of work that goes in to dealing with slate. You have to wash them, cut them, wash the cut ones again, lay them, wash them, seal them, seal them again, grout them, wash and wash and wash again to get the grout off, and then maybe apply another coat of sealer/colour enhancer.

Kitchen floor before:

Kitchen floor after:

Foyer before:

Foyer after: