19. April 2009 by admin.

We spent this morning working on a curtains and getting a system down for that.  We are using Steam-a-seam to fuse the hems together since neither of us knows how to sew and we don’t have a sewing machine.  We bought the fabric from Franklin Mill Store, which is a really nice fabric store with tons of current home decorator fabric.  The curtain rods are a wood with a walnut finish from JCPenney… great sales. :)  We’ve only finished two of the curtains, but I think it will start to go faster now.

I also finished the threshold for the exterior door, it turned out pretty nice.  We had to saw off the bottom of the door with the table saw to get clearance.  I’m not done with all of the moulding, but here is a quick shot of some of the quarter round.  I mixed two stains together to match the floor.  The quarter round was unfinished pine from Home Depot and installed with the nail gun.

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14. April 2009 by admin.

The next project we decided to work on was the side porch.  There was a lot of potential there but nothing was ever done to the space to make it really nice to be in.  There was some stained rubber backed carpet tiles and thats about it.  We decided to put a prefinished hardwood in, paint the walls, and make some curtains for all the windows.  There are windows going all the way around.  First was to reinforce the subloor planks with some 5/32″ plywood.

Then, we started looking at fabrics for the curtains, but none of these really caught our eye, except for Moxie’s?  Guess I’ll have to make another post of the fabric we ended up getting. :)  The non-winning ones, we got samples of from denverfabrics.com.

Under the windows we thought beadboard would look great especially with the age of the house.  I knew I would need a pneumatic finish nailer for some of the hardwood flooring so this was the perfect time to pick up a 16 gauge nailer to use with the beadboard paneling as well.  The nailer was awesome!  I used it for fastening the paneling and the chair rail that meets up against the window sill.  The nail holes were tiny and just a little joint compound and a quick sand over each one concealed the hole.  After some caulking in of a few open cracks, everything got primed.

Now, it really started transforming once the priming was done, we picked colors and applied it. The colors really play into the the colors in the fabric for the curtains.

Now it was time to install the flooring.  We went with a 3/4″ solid hardwood wide plank from Lumber Liquidators.  Its the Knob Hill Birch, handscraped and in a dark stain.  We bought it about two weeks ago and it was sitting in our dining room getting acclimated to the humidity in our house.  Before installing a 15 lb roofing asphalt paper was layed down and stapled.  Then I put a chalk line on the floor against one wall to get a nice straght line for the first row of flooring.  After that I was able to put the rest of the flooring in today with an air floor nailer that I rented.  We really like how it turned out.  Next step is to fill in any nail holes, paint the heater covers, and install the mouldings around the outside.

I wonder what Moxie thinks of her new space?

Time to teach Moxie that she has to clean up for herself in the new porch.

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