studio compartment

Hey, remember this? It's the add-on build-over hyphenation spectactular room above my garage....

This pic is from when I moved in (which BTW, this weeks marks my one year move-in anniversary). It's where my music studio space is supposed to be (it currently unhappily lives in one of the small bedrooms downstairs), but I've been so obsessed with kitchen world that I haven't gotten to it. One of its hideous caveats was that it had no HVAC, so during the summer it was mindblowingly hot, but as blogged about recently, I had a super powerful (16,000 BTU) mini-split combo A/C/heat pump installed, so now it's totally comfy. With the kitchen on hold 'til hood and oven arrive, I've been going nuts up there. For starters, the bulk of the carpet got torn out months ago leaving bare wood (you should've seen me dragging a 20x13 roll of carpet downstairs by myself. I don't recommend that.) which I'm gonna redo in laminate fake-o-wood. Here's what's happened over the last week...

Finally finished framing the wall for the vocal isolation booth (John and I originally did most of it back in January!). And managed to have one of the unsecured 2x4's fall and hit me in the head causing a minor concussion (complete with three-day massive headache) and an ugly lump on my forehead. I'm happy to report I'm all recovered from this and only a little dummer than before...

Myke and I installed the pre-hung solid-core door months ago, and as you can see I stuffed the walls with fiberglass insuation. This being an inside wall, the insulation is strictly for sound dampening purposes. That said, since we didn't want to make any holes for ducts (so as to avoid sound transmission), the A/C install guy actually routed a vent and return from the main house A/C unit into there, so the booth and room are separately cooled. I haven't done it yet, but I'm gonna get a bluetooth thermostat so I can effectively turn the A/C in the booth on and off without having to run downstairs. Triiiicky.

Next we have the drywalled version. Who loves doing drywall? Not me!

... and below is the mudded-over-screw holes version. Much of this was done by Kim, who was excited to wield a putty knife (or "a trowel!" as she calls it). In her defense, drywall mudding entails neither putty nor cutting. I didn't take pics but there were (of course) tons of random holes and stupidity for me to fix on the walls all over the place.

 The paint scheme in here is gonna basically be white, but I love an accent wall, so here we have a Scion xB slate blue/gray one, mostly painted by Kim. I took this pic at night with a bunch of lighs in the room, so it looks a little funky. I may or may not paint the booth door the same color (that or I'll stain the wood). In the foreground you can see all the white moulding trim; this is for the perimeter of the door, but I'll use the same stuff for baseboards once the floor's in. BTW, having bare floorboards in the room makes drop cloths completely unnecessary when painting, which is pretty handy.

Probably the biggest pain in the ass has been that little window (here we're looking out of the booth from the inside). It's basically 2x4 framing with drywall on the inside permeter and plastic drywall edging material for, you guessed it, the edges. It takes a LOT of drywall compound application and sanding to get these smooth. I've done roughly four rounds of this and I think it's pretty enough for me. After I paint it, I'm gonna put in 1x2 pieces in the middle perimeter then mount a piece of glass on each side with glued-in 1/4 round pieces to hold the glass in place. BTW, there's no glass in the pic below; it's a total optical illusion... what appears to be reflections in the "glass" are actually just the white patches on the wall in the background.

My Michaelangeloesque sculpting work close-up... for more optical illusion fun, what appears to be reflections in the "glass" here are actually reflections from the big window in the background.

I had planned to primer the inside of the booth today, but I needed to caulk the edges and do other various prep work. Getting' there.

holy crap.

Thought I'd post this pic I just stumbled on. It's from May 3rd. Yuck!

the pushback

As previously discussed, mr. monster fridge has been sticking out two feet for the last month or so because I didn't want to push it back in place 'til we were sure the water line behind it was leak-free- mainly because pulling a flush-to-the-cabs 500 lb chunk of metal out ain't easy. After a forever-ish wait for my super-overkill reverse osmosis system to arrive from Amazon (actually BofA's fault for arbitrarily changing my Amex card #, thereby causing order cancellation, and it was considerably pricier the second time... grrrr), it landed two days ago and I had Larry the plumber install it yesterday. Sure enough, the turkeys who moved my fridge and installed the brass water line behind did it totally incorrectly causing a leak back there (fortunately of the minor variety), so it was another visit from the plumber today and another $85 to straighten it out (explantion: when they installed all the island plumbing, the plumbers included an extra line under the concrete going from the island to the rear of the fridge for reverse osmosis water to the fridge, but it wasn't connected until now).

Now leak free, all I had to do was push it back (very heavy), raise all the feet so it would properly sit beneath the "tip protection" 2x4 on the wall (before you ask, there are long horizontal bolts that you turn from the front/bottom to adjust the back height) and generally make it vertically even with the cabinets. Also had to plug it into my special high-up outlet because up 'til this point I've been using a beefy extension cord. Remember this mess? The idea is that you push it back then raise all four legs until it gently touches the bottom of that very stoutly mounted 2x4 sticking off the wall. And you plug into that very high-up outlet because in theory there isn't enough room between the back of the fridge and the wall once it's pushed in. I also found that I had to remove the wood trim piece above it to plug it in, which is semi-tricky given how I mounted it (admittedly this would've been easier if I had a real ladder).

Unlike a regular fridge that has clearance on the sides and sticks out in front, a built-in like this has an aluminum lip around the sides and top that fits directly against the front edges of the cabs, so you can imagine the amount of super-tight measurement and planning that went into the cabinetry and trim pieces. It took a fairly large amount of tweaking the height and wrestling the bastard back and forth to get it all in place, but I'm happy to report (thank god) it all lined up as planned.

While I was at it, I attached the handles for the upper and lower cabs on the right- I skipped them before because it was too much of a pain to get between the sticking-out fridge and the wall on the right. Finally, for all the naysayers, the refrigerator doors open properly and clear the island with plenty of room to spare (ok, actually just Myke and my mom- believe me there were far hairier/more critical measurement planning conundrums than this).

BTW, thanks Kim for the stainless steel polish that made mr. Sub-Zero shiny and happy for this shot (even though it smells a little like Raid).

Update on Thursday, October 11, 2012 at 11:51PM by celebutante

Addendum... after letting it get up to speed (freeze?) all day, the icemaker works like gangbusters. This is a relief because I was told Sub-zero fridges sometimes need some sort of pump for the water going into the icemaker for them to work, not to mention this is a 15-year-old-ish fridge, so I'm lucky everything works as it should. Super reverse-osmosed icewater through ye door is swell indeed (and has a nifty blue glow when you use it).

getting a handle on things

Spent much of last night installing all the cabinet pull handles. Since the drawer fronts and cab doors have no preexisting holes, it's a lot harder than it looks. After going measure and level crazy for the first couple, I did some research and found this handy doodad:

This lets you set it on the edge of the door and gives hole guides for various handle widths. You then knock a starter hole with a center punch and drill away. It still takes some very careful measuring to find the exact middle of drawers (and mine all ended in 13/16" which makes the math super duper fun) and I was pretty careful with a level, but it did make the job a million times easier. That said, I still managed to drill the holes slightly offset on one of the drawers, yay stupid me. Not sure what I'm gonna do about that.

In other news, I bit the bullet today and ordered the Verona built-in gas oven, which is this:

I'm not totally in love with it, but there aren't a lot of choices for 24"-wide built-in gas ovens (electric is less efficient, and more importantly I don't have 220-volt power in there and it would cost a fortune to retrofit). It is Italian though, and much prettier than Maytag/other domestic crap.

Also sprung for vent hood:

This one is pretty and flat like I wanted, and fortunately not crazy expensive like most in this style (it's around $500). Reviews varied wildly, which makes me nervous, but hoods seem to be one of those items where it's hard to find a product with universally positive reviews.

Switching the channel again...

Remember this guy? It's been slowly and steadily getting worked on for weeks. Piano dude re-strung the whole thing and he's been tuning it once a week ever since. Every time it holds tune a little better, so now it's a little out, but pretty well in the ballpark (I can play it without it sounding utterly awful). He tells me we're very close, and next visit he'll attach the pedals (note that they're missing), so I'll have a sustain pedal which will make a big ol' difference in fun-to-play quotient.

oops, there's a crane in my driveway.

Yikes. Two things are happening... mainly I'm having a new mini-split A/C installed for my over-garage studio (which currently has no HVAC, thus is uninhabitably hot), and hey, while they're up there, they're replacing one of my two A/C/heat units for the house which is ORIGINAL TO THE HOUSE (that means it's 49 years old, holy moly). They're giving me a swingin' deal because it's a five-year-old used unit (but super efficient), and because my A/C's are on top of the house, the idea is to do it all in one shot because getting above crane truck and guy is something you don't want to pay for twice.