Archive for the ‘Remodeling’ Category

House update – Starting to look like a house, lots of new pictures!

Posted on the December 16th, 2007 under house,Interesting,Levittown,long island,Remodeling by

Well the house is actually starting to look like a real house now! Closets are starting to get shelves, rooms are getting painted, the kitchen *almost* looks like a kitchen (less a counter top!). Now is a good time for me to say we wouldn’t be able to do this with out the help of Johnny O, who has been here every single weekend since we bought the place helping out with everything from the wood floors to ripping closet doors.

Now onto the pictures and updates…

Appliances are in (except for the sink / dishwasher which will go in after the counter top). I managed to wire the outlet for the microwave, and install it by myself – patted myself on the back after that.

P.S. All these pics can be viewed here also on flickr via a sideshow -> http://www.flickr.com/photos/burmjohn/sets/72157603473704766/show/

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Food in our house, finally!

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The Bathroom now has lights, and lots of them!

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Our hallway closet now has a door, shelves, and food!

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The other closet (jacket closet) in the entrance way now has a door, walls, and shelves – Along with some access panels.

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In the closet I wired the control unit to the Paloma instant hot water heater, which hopefully will be saving us up to 30% a year in gas bills…

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In the entrance hallway I wired in a new lighting fixture, now everyone that enters the house can feel like they are starring in Broadway play.

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Living room, cleaned up a bit , now featuring a Christmas tree! Only a few things left to do here is to hang shelves, crown molding and floor molding & Window molding and outlet switches.

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Another angle of the living room…

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Here is the master bedroom, all painted! Its hard to see the colors in these shots below, but the walls are a tanish color and the back wall is chocolate. We still need to paint the windows and add molding, clean up the base board heating and replace the fan.

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Other angle in the master bedroom.

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This room is obviously not touched yet, but its our temporary bedroom which eventually will be the office.

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This is the almost done laundry room upstairs.

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The other side featuring a nice slop sink…

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That’s it for now… As you can see everything is moving along pretty well and I am off to relax.

Another weekend gone, some small updates…

Posted on the December 3rd, 2007 under house,Levittown,long island,Remodeling by

Well another weekend has past and some more things were accomplished. Johnny O worked on getting the entrance to the house slated with the natural slate my wife picked out. It looks really nice.

He also cut the molding to trim out the fire place, and I got to fire up the brad nailer that my Dad has purchased for us. It worked out really nice. We grouted the seams after and it needs one more cleaning to get the extra grout off, but the molding really finished off the wood floor to slate transition nicely.

During the week I had started to replace some of my rocker switches for the highhats with Insteon dimmer switches. These are really nice, they have LED indicators to show the brightness levels and it makes it easy to see them in the dark. They are also X10 compatible so they can be controlled via a remote control or your PC. Im hoping to replace most of the switches in the house with these. Check them out here -> http://www.smarthome.com/2476d-light-dimmer.html

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This weekend I spend about 90% of my time working in the master bedroom. The ceiling was a mess and needed to be screwed in (old nails were popping), spackled and sanded. I finally was able to put two coats of the Benjamin Moore ceiling paint on and it came out pretty good, at least its a lot better then what it was. This week I’ll be panting the walls, there is just some minor spackling to get done on the spots I might have missed.

Jamie also was able to stop by on Friday and figure out why the circulator for the baseboard heating was constantly running. He re-wired the relay for the pump, and I ran out and purchased a new thermostat to run the downstairs. It seems to be running perfect now, I just have to snake the wire down the wall and mount it this week. I am going to replace all of the zones with new thermostats, hopefully saving money from the increased energy savings.

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I also ordered a cat 6 patch panel and received it this week from eBay. I dont know when I’ll have time to finish and clean up some of the wiring. I still have to finish running my surround sound cables in the living room. So much to do, so little time!

Kitchen is almost in! Its starting to look like a house.

Posted on the November 27th, 2007 under house,Levittown,Remodeling by

The kitchen is almost all in, and its actually starting to look like a house now.  The bathroom downstairs is now fully functional, the laundry room is done (with the exception of some molding and shelves).  Here are some pictures: