I moved my old egg dish into the new fridge. It holds 2 dozen if you stack well and you don’t have to lift a lid.
The butter dish was just a good spot to store small things, as well as butter. I have a tiny bottle of Zatidor allergy eye drops that I keep in the fridge and I don’t want it to get lost!
I have to say, my old fridge had some ridiculous compartments. It had a drawer marked “microwave items” that held 4 Corning “grab it” bowls in little holders and that was it. The whole width of the fridge for those 4 bowls. We took all that out and stashed it in the garage. Now the old fridge is in there too. It’s great to have an extra one! It’s early 90’s Amana and will hopefully last another decade.
@greenwitch I think I have that same design. It is now in our garage. Those grab and go containers are odd. I don’t know what happened to that egg container but I still have those 4 odd drawers.
I have a 20 year old Kitchen Aid built in refrigerator with water and ice in the freezer door. I don’t mind the lost freezer space but we did have a difficult time when the filtered water line that went to the refrigerator leaked. It was hard to find and no one wanted to move the refrigerator out to find the leak. I use a commercial refrigeration repairman for it and he tells me to keep fixing it as the newer ones don’t last.
Update…did I tell you we are now planning to use wall mounted sink faucets in the master bath? We need to build a 3” deep wall as another layer on the current wall as it is an exterior wall and the plumber is insistent that we would otherwise have frozen pipes.
We removed an email electronic remote for the shower and moved the shower controls to be more easily reachable from the door.
We are making some adjustments to the tile placements to deal with the costs. Today we are meeting at the marble yard to make sure our selections work with the marble.
The designer had an especially good idea for the feature wall in the water closet. Rather than tile, she has suggested a tonal stencil to coordinate with the tile (used outside the WC room). This is one idea. They have many good choices.
OMG there is a home improvement thread!!! I LOVE CC! I’m going to have to go back and read everything when I have time but we are gearing up for a major reno. We are moving a stairwell, completely redoing the kitchen, moving a powder room, and creating a master suite. I have most of my cabinets, finishes, and appliances selected but my husband and I disagree about the tile backsplash for the kitchen. He wants something more elaborate and I’d like it simple. I know myself and I would get sick of some something busy quickly. Plus the house is 114 years old and I’d like to have something in keeping with the age of the house. There is subway and hexagonal tiles elsewhere so I wanted to take my cues from that. @mom22039 that stencil is AMAZING!
We have 2x6 walls with spray foam for our had to be on the exterior wall plumbing. So far so good!
It’s really hard to do slab on grade around here - you still need frost protection and if you put it on the exterior of the building the termites and carpenter ants eat it up. Many of the older houses I work on have first floors two or three feet above grade level so the extra cost of just extending the basements is not that much more than doing a crawl space and you can either insulate the basement walls or ceiling depending on whether the basement is finished or not.
We have 2x6 walls with spray foam for our had to be on the exterior wall plumbing. So far so good!
It’s really hard to do slab on grade around here - you still need frost protection and if you put it on the exterior of the building the termites and carpenter ants eat it up. Many of the older houses I work on have first floors two or three feet above grade level so the extra cost of just extending the basements is not that much more than doing a crawl space and you can either insulate the basement walls or ceiling depending on whether the basement is finished or not.
Last year i retired from my job in tech and my wife and I have been planning a move to wine country. We started our search in Santa Rosa, spent two weekends up there touring 25 houses in total but not finding the match with a combo of land and house. A month later the fires happened and nine of those homes were lost. We put things on hold and then decided to switch to San Luis Obispo county (about half way between LA and San Francisco along the coast).
Well, last week my wife and i closed escrow on a home near Paso Robles CA. The house is 20 years old, in good shape structurally, but oh my in need of major cosmetic work. The seller was a smoker as well as a collector (aka small type hoarder). We plan on repainting the interior, new floors, new kitchen and 3 new bathrooms. No walls need to be moved - we like the layout.
Outside, the seller stopped watering 5 years ago so the landscaping is in tough shape. We have 5 acres of weeds and at least 14 dead trees. A crew will be coming in to clean up and give us a clean slate. We would like to plant a hobby vineyard of wine grapes, along with olive and fruit trees, assorted bushes and a front lawn. This is predicated on having a good well - so we are drilling that as soon as possible. The neighbors get 30 gallons a minute so we are keeping our fingers crossed.
We are hoping to start construction in July on the interior and have interviewed contractors and are waiting for their bids. Permits will take about 60 days so we want to get that clock started.
I’ll be posting progress as we go along and asking questions as they arise. CC has always been a great resource for me and this thread seems like the right place. Please let me know if i should be elsewhere.
Sounds like a big project, @scualum, but what fun!! I hope you got this property for a good price, since you’ll be doing a lot of work. But at the end of the day, you’ll have a house that both of you love.
Please post away, @scualum ! Would love to hear your story. Mr. B’s boss did a similar thing - got a house south of San Jose and is turning it into a hobby winery. Would love to hear about your progress!
It’s mostly a very light beige with some gray in it. We need the gray to complement the Venatino marble on the counters.
While this tile size is much larger than I want, the contractor will cut the tile into a smaller size, to be determined. The leather finish is a nice texture underfoot.
Please don’t go with tiny tiles with lots of grout. We stayed at a fancy lodge style hotel last weekend that had small marble tiles in some sort of fish sale pattern with what used to be white grout, and while the bath was luxurious, the grout lines on the floor were absolutely disgusting.
The upstairs bathrooms are gone, and the framing is well under way.
Progress!
We’ve run into one issue so far - it turns out that one of the walls we took out was a supporting wall. This wall runs right through the two new bathrooms, so they had to add a beam. For the master, it’s not a big deal, we will drop the ceiling of the shower to the beam level. For the other bathroom, it’s sort of in the middle of the room. I don’t want to drop the whole ceiling, as that would leave it at about 7’6" high, so we will just sheetrock it in and paint it.
Wow, that is a lot of progress, @notrichenough ! Beams are unfortunate but they have a purpose. The prior owner of out pad took out a support post in the basement because she wanted a flat wall in the basement bathroom (the post would have created a bump out for the mirror/vanity). When we toured the home, the first thing we noticed was the sagging floor in the living room, but the listing agent insisted that was “normal.” Lol. After the deal closed, we called a local expert who did a marvelous job putting the post back where it belonged and jacked up the sagging floor. Now I can walk through the living room without feeling dizzy. And we really don’t care that the vanity is sticking out a few inches.
We have a structural beam that runs right down the middle of our new kitchen design. Our kitchen designer wants us to “shrink” the beam. I’m thinking that’s an expensive fix for something I think could visually disappear if it was painted the ceiling color. Right now the beam is painted the wall color. We have a big reno ahead of us of a 114 year old home and I don’t want to touch our contingency budget unless it’s a must fix. Any thoughts?
@mathmom
Thanks for the clarification on slab on grade in the frost areas
I love the stencil!!! I love that it costs $40, but obviously costs a lot more in paint labor BUT, even better, it can just be painted over if you get tired of it, need to neutralize it for a sale in the future, or you decide you just don’t like it with the look of the finished design. I’m going to steal that idea for some of my projects! It might even be the kind of paint project I could piddle away at while the crew does the heavy lifting on the rest of the project.
Having to build out 3" on the inside of your wall in order to have wall mounted faucets would not be worth it in my universe. I’m not clear on why you cannot use some kind of nuclear efficient spray insulation to wrap those pipes??? It’ s got to be easier than building out the wall !
That is fantastic progress. Sometimes things seem like they are going to be horrible when the issue comes up. In the end, if it can just get neutralized with paint and/or drywall, it’s something only you will notice. And then maybe for only 1 month.
And we really don’t care that the vanity is sticking out a few inches.