Instead of playing wacky games this year, Mom had the idea everyone would do a Christmas-themed painting. Lucky for me, I learned a few tricks earlier this year during a work activity. I decided on a snowy night sky with Santa and his reindeer.
Here are all seven works of art.
I looked at the back of the canvas and though the frame was interesting; they interlocked the corner joints to make them stronger.
Today, my team at Automattic did an hour long painting activity over Zoom. I’ve never done anything like this, so it was fun.
At some point I’ll have to make a frame to hang it on a wall in my workshop.
We had the idea to convert one of the spare bedrooms in to a closet for Brandi. Here’s what the room looked like after clearing it out.
After pulling out the carpet (and maybe painting?), we decided to design and build (not ourselves!) a house. Very exciting and we’ve been working through the process for a few months now.
So plans changed for the room. We painted the walls and inside of the closet with a white to brighten things up. Here you can see a bit of how dirty it looked in the closet.
We painted some shelving (the actual shelves are missing here) in the corner of the closet instead of installing new stuff. Here’s a look after paint.
With the upcoming move we bought cheaper flooring from Menards instead of getting the stuff we’ve used from Sam’s Club. The cheaper stuff is definitely harder to work with and I did the room by myself in about 6-7 hours.
The room didn’t have any ceiling lighting, which I’ll never understand. So I installed a ceiling fan and rewired the switch, which previously controlled an outlet.
I cleaned up and restained the trim instead of buying new stuff. There wasn’t any trim in the closet, so I bought white PVC trim for simplicity. I still need to get some quarter round for the room since a few flooring edges show.
I don’t like the floor style, but the next owner’s can worry about it. This was cheap and did the job. If we hadn’t already tore out the carpet, we would have left the room alone, saving a bunch of time and money.
After the living room and kitchen, the plan was to run the same flooring through the hallways. When we bought the flooring for the kitchen we get enough, so it had been piled up in my office since November. Here’s the old flooring my dad and I had installed in 2013.
Needed a bit of a break after the kitchen project, so after a few weeks we finally got started. I removed all of the trim and some doors that were in the way.
Of course, the project grew from there. When we removed the double doors from the hobby room it really brightened up the space.
Since we never close those doors we decided not to put them back up and with the hallways having wallpaper I’d have to do something with the door jamb. With the closets empty we noticed how bad the walls were, so it was a good time to refresh the paint. The shelving in the broom closet was terrible so we’d install all new adjustable shelves. My DIY automated lighting in there had failed, so I found a LED strip with motion sensor on Amazon for about $25 that works great. Of course I had to run a new electrical line up from the basement and install an outlet. I had also wanted a place to plug in the Ryobi 40v batteries used for the snow blower and lawn mower, so it worked out.
It was fun trying to figure out how to piece flooring around the stairs.
I chopped the top off of the shoe rack I had made for workout shoes and moved it from the broom closet to the coat closet. We have a lot of shoes!
There was a lot of finishing work with trim and new quarter round, but we’re so glad to have it all completed.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been busy with home improvements. First my Dad came down for a weekend and we did some odds and ends, but the big project was installing a ceiling fan/light in my bedroom. Previously there wasn’t a light in the room and with it being a pretty large room it was hard to see with just a corner lamp in the room.
Neither my Dad or I are electricians or have any experience, but we got the project done and learned a lot along the way. The original configuration had a switch at the door of the room which controlled the top plug of two outlets. In the end, this switch draws power and is connected to another switch inside my closet (which is right by my bed). So now I can turn the light/fan on when walking in/out the room and also when jumping into bed. All of the plugs on the outlets are always hot now and no longer controlled by a switch. The entire project too a whole day, 4 trips to Home Depot, and who knows how many trips up into the attic. It sure does make the room look nice though.
On Sunday I started tearing down wallpaper in the closet and sink area of my bedroom. The original plan was to do both this are and the bathroom at the same time. After over 5 hours on the first room, I decided to turn them into two separate projects because not having good lighting and a mirror by the sink really sucks! Monday I moved all of my clothes out of the closet (the wallpaper stopped right before the closet area of the room) and took down all of the shelving and clothes hanging bars, then scrubbed any remaining glue from the walls and wiped them down. Last night I sanded and patched up all of the holes and marks on the walls. Hopefully tonight I can sand my patch jobs, wipe down the walls, put on some Kilz where it’s needed, and get the painting done. That would leave Thursday night to put everything back together in the room, move in my clothes, and finally unpack some boxes which hadn’t been done since moving in.
Every project turns out to be much harder and more time consuming than you originally think, but of course I then add on to them as well. I don’t like to do shit half-ass, so I do the extra work. I figure if I’m working on it, might as well do things right the first time and spend the extra time.
Owning a home is really a lot of work, but it feels great to accomplish something and know you are adding value to your home at the same time as you’re making it look great.
Nick Momrik 