Category Construction

This summer, I’m planning on running water lines from the main house to the guest house, and connecting drain lines from the guest house to the septic system on our land. This will enable me to have a water heater installed (I’ll have a professional do this, since it involves working hooking up liquid propane lines, which I want no part of), and then install a bathroom in the guest house. Initially, this seemed like a pretty intimidating project, but in reality all it will involve is digging a trench below the frostline (after having digger’s hotline mark any buried electrical lines), along roughly these lines:

I’m working on improving my woodworking and trim skills through several minor projects in the house this winter. I’m planning on replacing the railing on both stairwells with nicer wood and better hardware. Also, I’d like for the railing wood to be continuous, with smooth corners and no cutoffs in the corners. Here is what it looks like now:

You can purchase rounded corner sections that can be joined to the straight sections of wood, in red oak, which looks very nice when stained:

Before I do that, I’m learning how to get the right color and finish on the wood, and to join the corners to the straight sections seamlessly:

In addition to the railing project, I’m also learning how to do crown molding. I’m planning on putting crown molding in the guest bedroom first, since it is a fairly standard rectangular room that will be a good proving ground for us to see how it will look in the other bedrooms in our house. My goal is to match the stain color with the other trim in our house, which is a golden pecan stained oak. Crown molding is somewhat complicated to install, with the biggest challenge being cutting and aligning the corners perfectly. The DIY Network has a good tutorial video on how to install it. My goal is to achieve an effect something like the following:

Last winter, I remodeled the bathroom off of our kitchen. It originally had a lot of fairly tacky 1990’s style gold fixtures in it, like this:

The end result turned out pretty well, and definitely as a different look from the original:

However, I didn’t get around to installing a door on the shower, and recently installed a clear glass door with an oil-rubbed bronze frame from Sterling, which matches the sink and shower fixtures. It was a fairly straightforward installation, with the only challenge being anchoring the either side of the frame into the wall through the arabesque tiles on the shower walls.

Here is the final result, after the door was fully installed: