In the meantime, I got to work on a project I've been contemplating for a long time (and bought most of the materials for last week)... DIY closet doors for the middle/guest/Kim bedroom. There are two closets side-by-each in there. Each has an opening 72" wide with two doors and goes from floor to ceiling. Here are the current mirrored monstrosity doors:

I dislike the mirrors, and more importantly I hate the brown picture-frame-special frame. I contemplated long and hard... one idea was to get Ikea Pax wardrobe doors, but the slick silver and opaque glass ones were about $250 a pair, and I'd need two pairs (actually, I'd need four pairs, because the room next to this one has identical closets and doors). This doesn't even take into account shipping, which would likely be around $300, so that wasn't gonna fly.

I did a lot of googling DIY closet doors, and people were commonly making 1x4 frames, then using a variety of backing materials for the popular "panel" effect... like this:

This one doesn't look too bad, but in general I'm not a fan of the sunken panel effect (don't get me going about beige six-panel doors), so it occurred to me that I could make something like this, nail a flat piece of 1/4" luan wood to it, and essentially hang it backwards. This way you'd have the structural stability of the frame, but the front would look like a flat slab of wood, and I'm all about a flat unadorned slab (because I've seen 2001 too many times- like this). I got the luan panels from Peterman's Lumber here (fancy wood place), because the Lowe's Depot doesn't carry 1/4" luan, and accidentally bought the wrong thing. Luan is sort of a cheapo medium-brown mahogany, and was frequently used for wood wall cladding in sixties houses, so that was the plan, but the "good" side of the stuff I bought is actually birch, which is considerably lighter (think of the light wood  on every piece of Ikea furniture you've ever seen, but not fake). I was gonna return it, but since I thought I'd hit with some of my swell new Watco Danish Oil Golden Oak rub-on stain on one corner and see how it turned out, which is this:

The picture doesn't really do it justice- it's WAY nicer in person...  almost zebrawood-ish, super smooth, pretty shiny and I haven't applied polyurethane yet. So I'm keeping this stuff for the doors. In ze meantime, I already picked up a bunch of 1x4 for the frames so I went to work on that today... a little detour here... if you ponder the idea of attaching 1x4's end to end (which in reality are 3/4" thick, 3 1/2" wide and however long you cut them), there aren't many good ways to do so. You can't really screw them together, because you'd need to use really long screws. You could use L-brackets, but that would be kind of ghetto and probably not very strong. There's lots of glue options if you're a pro woodworker- biscuit joints, finger tenon thingees, blah blah. Enter the Kreg Pocket Hole Jig:


You clamp this awesome piece of awesomeness to the end of one of your 1x4's, and it lets you drill a perfectly angled hole in exactly the correct spot. They've pretty much thought of everything- they include a bit with a collar so the depth is exact, and the box it comes in has a guide for where to tighten the collar on the bit for different material widths. They have you use special square-head screws that won't strip, and they include a driver bit too. It's next to impossible to screw up. The kit is around $40, which is a little steep, but it's worth every penny. Here's what it looks like clamped in place with a standard wood clamp:


And what you end up with:

Just for fun, I wood glued the whole mess too. Since switching bits every time is no fun, it become rapidly apparent that "production lining" all my holes was the way to go. I wasn't thinking too hard about how the things were gonna be built, so I drilled way more holes than necessary, but it didn't really hurt anything. Duh.

Here's a completed frame:

I built three-and-a-half of them today. Would've been four, but as usual, I underestimated how much lumber I'd need, so while I'm getting that drywall tomorrow for the shelves, I'm gonna get another eight-foot 1x4 to cut the remaining pieces. Anyway, between the perfectly centered pairs of pocket holes and the wood glue, they're pretty darn strong. Tomorrow I'll cut the 1/4" luan panels for the faces and nail those on- had to buy a new 18 gauge brad nailer from Harbor Freight for that (the 16 gauge one I've been borrowing from John can't use short enough nails). Lucky for me, it was only $20... yay cheapo Harbor Freight.

I'm also gonna need to get new hardware for the doors to slide- the current hardware has the doors rolling on the floor, whereas I want them to hang (not only is the floor track ugly dark brown, but it'll complicate my future laminate wood floor install). Finally, I'll need to make new wood valance pieces to hide hardware up top. There are pieces there now, but like everything else in this damn place, they've been slathered in gross brown paint.

and after-ish. I say "-ish" because they still need various sanding and paint touch-up of the patches that conceal the nails. I already caulked all the corners, but need to paint that too (at least on the blue wall, not so much on the white walls), There isn't really a big stain on the wall, that's some sort of photo artifact.


While I was at it I decided to fix some wallpaper mess that I must've been too lazy to fix when I originally painted. I attacked it with a putty knife, so that's why there's patches above the baseboard...

After sanding, painting. The photo is making the caulk look really yellowy for some reason. It's not. Baseboard still needs work:

Then I ran into a little problem. Remember this hot mess o' hotness?


I demo'd that guy way back in Novemeber of 2011, and ever since there's been an empty space wherein I planned to add shelving. Me being me, cheap and simple wasn't gonna do; I had to have something expensive and complicated, and I found it in Hunter Wimmer's Redneck Modern blog- basically this (hopefully he doesn't mind that I'm stealing his pics):

What's goind on there is he's essentially built a false wall- the brackets (from Rakks) are pretty much like any run-of-the-mill slotted brackets you get at Home Depot, but they're designed to countersink. And they don't actually have visible slots, because they use a fancy pin system with the hangers. The pic will explain the countersink much better (also stolen from Redneck Modern). You can read all about his installation here, here, and here if you're interested in how someone who knows what they're doing does things.

I'm basically gonna do the same thing, but instead of fancy veneered plywood, I'm gonna use 5/8" drywall, painted a festive orange. Instead of attempting to line up the screws holding the "in-between" drywall pieces and the brackets to the studs, I realized it would be far easier to install horizontal strips of 3/4" plywood and attach everything to those. I ripped these down to 3" wide with my table saw... they're leftover plywood from when we demo'd the bay window in my family room:

Since the distance from the lip to the back of the bracket is 5/8", I just need to get some 5/8" drywall, figure out the width of the drywall pieces, carefully cut it to the exact width, then screw the whole mess to the horizontal pieces (there's a correct name for these that I can't remember).

As you can see, the front lip on the bracket gives a little fudge room if the drywall width isn't perfect, but not much. The good news is that this whole mess is 39" wide, and not only is drywall 48" wide, but you have to buy two pieces at a time, so I should have a couple extra chances if I screw up. Once that's all done, I'm gonna get a pricey and pretty 4x8' piece of mahogany-veneer 3/4" plywood, cut out a bunch of shelves and stain and poly them up all nice-like. I'm even considering sawing some slots in the top and bottom ones so I can do little sliding doors, but we'll see how that works out.

"How does this relate to the stupid baseboards", you ask? Well, since I'm doing a false wall that will stick out 1 3/8", I need to wait until it's installed before I can finish the baseboards on the back and sides... which is what motivated me to finally get cracking on the stupid shelf project!

Finally, if the shelf thing works out swell and I don't permanently attach my finger to a shelf with construction adhesive, the Big Plan is that I'm gonna do the exact same kind of thing here, which looked like this when I moved in:

It actually looked pretty nice (besides the gold hardware), but the cabs were so shallow that they were useless for anything other than maybe wine bottles. Currently there's nothing there- floor is polished concrete and walls are painteed white- guess that was wasted time. My plan is to do shelving on all three walls as detailed above. This'll be nice because I still have boxes of books and LP's (remember those?). Wait 'til to see what I have up my sleeve to play those on...

UPDATE: Kim and I figured that the mysterious spot in the pics I took today is probably a splotch on the lens of camera. I am the Barney Rubble of photography.

If you look at the photo you might notice the piece of duct tape holding it shut (it's hinged at the bottom and swings down for filter replacement). It sort of wedges shut, but because it's bent, it likes to fall down and open. This all could've been circumvented (get it?) had they not installed it upside down, thus allowing our pal gravity to hold it shut... but I refer you back to that "any-job-worth-doing..." axiom. Anyway, after it falling open for the zillionth time (not to mention what a @&*%ing eyesore it was), I finally decided to swap it out for the new one. My swanky house will have to get by with a white vent on a white wall. And BTW, the new one has little half-twist screws at the bottom to hold it shut (relatively unnecessary, because captain genius here installed it right-side up- it's now hinged at the top).

To remove the old one, I carefully sliced around the perimeter with a utility knife to make sure I didn't mess up the paint, then unscrewed four hex-head sheet metal screws inside. Fortunately the new one was exactly the same dimensions. After I screwed it in, I caulked the perimeter to make it look nice.

My next project should be getting underway real soon and it's gonna be a doozy- I'm going to attempt to make my own closet doors for one of the bedrooms to replace the mirror 'n' fake wood monstrosities that currently live there. Just ordered this nifty pocket-hole jig hotness this morning to assist in making the 1x3 frames... stay tuned.

Rememer the futon I was blabbing about a couple weeks back? Urban Outfitters took their damn sweet time, but six weeks later, it has landed. Meanwhile, the "old" futon has now made its way up to the studio where I had originally intended it to be:

Like the purpley-gray one, no one's gonna mistake the new one for a fine multi-thousand dollar settee, but the wood is surprisingly nice considering the price (regularly $599, insane closeout price $249). This is it in brown/gray- for some happy reason, they stopped selling the black/white one, hence the crazy discount.

It's barely even a futon; the back cushions have flat bottoms and sit on top of the one-piece bottom cushion. When it's sleepy time, you simply remove the back cushions and lift out the metal support behind them and sleep atop what's left.

Here with the drywall pieces screwed in place. I've since mudded and sanded the whole mess. Still have to paint it, but I'm not going too nuts making it look perfect as it will be concealed by cabinet doors and trim pieces. Now I have to decide which microwave I'm gonna get then reinstall doors and make some trim pieces from the remaining mahogany pieces.

Finally, I ordered the futon below, this time spotted by Kim on Urban Outfitters (crazy cheap closeout at $249, regular $599). It's their "mid-century sofa", and I dig the minimal design and twill fabric. This will go downstairs by the piano, while the grayish-purple one that currently lives there will go up in the studio where it was initially intended to be. I didn't specifically need a futon for downstairs; a conventional loveseat would've been fine, but this was pretty neat and a great deal (I still have an entire couch in the garage for the "family room" when I get around to fixing that up). I guess the good part is that once we have the guest room going, my house will sleep around eight :P

Holy crapballs, I thought I'd never get there, but Upper Decker Studios is pretty much done. I still have some minor paint touch-up on the baseboards (as in, most sane people wouldn't notice), but as you can see, I brought up my big Ikea Broder shelf thingee and built up "keyboard rig #2" (that being a Prophet-5, Jupiter-4 and Korg Delta, for trainspotters. And Kim pulling a Dian Parkinson.), which is the ill-tempered, wonky old synths. The setup that I use all the time is this, minus the Alesis Ion, which just kinda happens to be sitting there:
... which currently lives in the seemingly endless sea of brown of one my bedrooms. This will all travel upstairs imminently. I'm not looking forward to getting that big studio rack on the right upstairs!

Here's what I've been up to in the home stretch:

A whole lot of drywall compound, sanding, caulking and painting to cover up nail holes and seams in the baseboards and quarter-rounds. This is really tedious, and crawling around on the nice hard new floor doesn't add to the joy. Makes a big mess too.

Same deal on the blue wall. My original plan was to use clear caulk so I wouldn't have to do as much touch-up painting, but I learned that paintable clear caulk does not exist (at least according to Handyman Keith). On a positive, this saved me a trip to Lowe's.

Next big job was door install. This was a big pain mainly because it's solid core and weighs a LOT. The threshold has a rubber seal strip at the bottom that wedges against the door bottom, but it requires you to cut the bottom of the door at a mild angle, so I had to wrestle it up (using shims to elevate it to the right height to install the hinge pins), figure out how much I needed to cut off the bottom, then take it down again and cut it with a Skilsaw. Then I had to put it up all over again. The bad part is it doesn't close 100% because I probably screwed up aligning the door jam when I installed it, but it's probably fixable (it's not that far off). I'll have handyman Keith work his magic; this is what he's good at. As you can see, I brought up my guitar rack.

After much debate, I wisely bit the bullet and decided to do recessed lighting... I still had eight of them left from the ones I installed downstairs- they were originally intended for the family room, so I'll get more when the time comes. As with the ones downstairs I had Keith do the bulk of the install. The tricky part this time was that there's no attic access upstairs, so we had to run the wires from below, and adding to the fun, the ceiling is drywall with one-inch thick 12"x12" acoustic tiles glued to it. These have likely been there since '76 when the addition was originally built, so you probably can't get them... meaning we had to be really careful cutting the holes (should be clear now why I had Keith do the install). Running the wires was also complicated by the large amount of blown in and batt-type insulation (which delightfully rains down upon you with every hole cut. Yum.) We used a wire snake (basically a big roll of rigid flat steel with a hook on the end) to run the romex cable. This is relatively easy when you're going the same direction as the roof joists (no obstacles) and a real bitch when you're not (it's like jumping hurdles you can't see, with lots of insulation to further screw you up). Patience is your friend here, and eventually we got all the wiring where it needed to be. Adding to this, the clips that hold Home Depot's Halo brand recessed lights in the ceiling are a nightmare to work with. Thanks again Keith, who has a higher frustration threshold than I.

There was a big hole in the middle of the room where the ceiling fan/light used to hang that needed patching. I used one of the round ceiling tile/drywall pieces Keith cut for the new lights. Since there were big gaps, Keith had the excellent idea to chop up some of the ceiling tile scrap and mix it with white latex caulk into a paste then use that as filler. This hides the patched area pretty well (sorry, I forgot to take a picture, but if you look really close, you can see between the two middle lights in the pic below).

Finished result:

Here's my handsome self prior to bringing up the keyboards today. Please note that I'm not actually obsessed with slate blue/gray. Just a coincidence (I really like orange- ask anyone).

Now I mainly just need to move everything up and wire it, and put some acoustic foam on the walls to damp down reflections. The main room isn't too bad, but as I expected, the vocal booth sounds like a tiny racquetball court with the door closed. Fortunately I have a lot of acoustic foam that I need to somehow stick on the walls; you don't really need a ton, just enough to tame it down. More on this later...

Here we have both yanked out. I kept the one on the left because it was at the same elevation as the others in the room. Initially I figured one of the outlets would be linked to the other, but for some reason the one on the right had its own romex (that's what they call the type of wire and it's easier to type than "120 volt wire") coming from somewhere else inside the wall, so I just hacked it, pulled back the wires and methodically electrical taped it.

After removing the electrical box from the one on the right I used the same trick I've used a million times- take a piece of 1x2 longer than the size of the hole and drywall screw it at the top and bottom so you have something to attach the drywall patch to. I actually messed up and screwed the bottom screw in too far and broke the existing drywall, but I put it in nearby and sort of made it work. Once it's slathered in drywall compound, it'll strengthen it and no one will be the wiser. On the left you can see where I embiggened the hole and replaced the existing box with a quad one. You can get boxes for "old" or "new" construction- the "old" construction kind are for situations where the drywall is already installed and they use little plastic wings on the screws that lock behind the drywall. The nice part is that you don't have to make the hole in the wall any larger, but they sometimes don't mount very solid and/or square if the drywall is old and brittle (that's me). Since I'm a drywall-patchin'-motherf&*r-motherf*@r and thus not scared of making big holes in walls, I went for the "new" construction kind of box, this particular one having a nifty metal mount that goes right over the 2x4 stud which is super easy to screw in and very solid. As you can see, there are two sets of romex; they have to attach to the plugs and each other...

... which entailed the tricky wiring below. Keep that fire extinguisher nearby! Just kidding, it's actually pretty simple. Essentially ze juice comes in one set of the wires, goes into the outlet, travels to the adjacent outlet via the two wires at the bottom then continues back through the other romex cable attached to the other outlet. It's a called a parallel circuit, and yes, this will be on the quiz.

Here were are all wired, screwed in and snug as a bug:

Now I gotta patch this mess. Here they are with drywall carefully cut to fit and mesh-taped over, ready for mud (my favorite Bad Company song).

And here with aforementioned mud:


Now I wait 'til tomorrow, sand, repeat mud 'n' sand, paint, and Bob's your uncle.

I also replaced most of the remaining outlets and switches today. Yucko old:


Perdy new. Funny looking chunk by the screw is photo weirdness, promise.


And the rest of 'em, at distance. I may actually spring for a bunch of brushed silver covers for all of them. Honestly I did black because I knew I'd have to seriously hack up one of them because of wall weirdness in the vocal booth (you'll see that later; I didn't do the ones in there yet), but I think the black looks a little weird on white walls. 


Super funny bar stool post-script...

I didn't really document the whole saga of the bar stools as it unfolded, because I didn't feel like typing it and no one would've read it, but the short version is that I ordered them from AllModern in July, they were insanely expensive ($240 each), it took two months to get them, and when they finally arrived, the metal inserts that the screws go into to hold the seats to the base were made wrong and wouldn't screw in. What followed was months of phone calls, shipping delays and much general frustration. To their credit, AllModern was pretty cool about the whole mess (the problems were almost completely the fault of the manufacturer). At one point they even gave me 30% off just as compensation for my troubles (and I didn't ask for it). After months of this madness, the replacements finally arrived last week, and the screws screwed as screws should screw.

Since I still have the defective bar stools, I called today to make arrangements to send them back. The guy at AllModern told me that since they were past some sort of time limit with the manufacturer, I could just keep the defective ones, and openly suggested I try and fix them. I believe they could be fixed with a tap and die set (that's a thingie that threads things for screws, since they failed to thread it properly from the factory). I knew this all along, but I wasn't motivated to try and fix theoretically new bar stools and didn't want to risk messing them up if they had to be returned. Now that they're free, my attitude has understandably shifted.. if I can fix 'em, I'll throw 'em on ebay, make a bunch of dough on them and effectively get my bar stools for next to nothing.

It may not look too different from the last pics I posted, but with the laminate floor installed, I spent the last week or so buying, painting and installing baseboards and quarter-round. This was delayed because I needed an air compressor and nail gun (handyman Keith repo'd his before the floor was finished). To make a long story short, I ended up buying a little three-gallon compressor from the always high-end Harbor Freight. With one of their coupons, it set me back a whopping $39.99, which is insanely cheap (THIS is it, if you're interested). I borrowed a 16 AWG trim nailer from John (which made me wish I had Keith's nicer one- this one sometimes doesn't fire the nails, which is super annoying). Anyhow, doing baseboards and quarter-round isn't hard per se, but it's tedious... zillions of angled cuts with John's compound mitre saw. It's super easy to get confused on which direction the angle of the cuts is supposed to be, so you tend to screw up a lot, which is partially why I wildly underestimated how much baseboard I'd need, so I had to make a second trip to the Depot to buy more.

For reference, pretty the same shot when I moved in. Yuck, it's like a poopy brown cave! Unfortunately, this is exactly how all three bedrooms currently look- someone really loved shit brown.


In case you were wondering, those zillions of cuts make a LOT of sawdust (though much of this was from cutting the laminate floor planks):


This is after I picked up the 10,000 little scraps and swept up a considerable amount. I had to towel down the walls too. Only thing left now is the also-tedious task of filling, sanding and paining all the nail holes (I initially painted them all outside prior to installation to avoid the mess and muck of paint you see in most houses).

Some fun details...

Not sure I photographed it that well, but I had to do a tricky indentation into the quarter round to accomodate this vent. I did it with the table saw (not really the ideal tool for the job, but you use what you got), I think it came out pretty good.


Remember me yabbing about vintage-looking brushed nickel Schlage Orbit door knobs? Here's one of the ones I ordered, installed in the newly-painted closet door in the studio. BTW, the piece of trim on the door frame was also tricky because the moulding was too wide to fit, so I had to rip it down with the table saw to make it fit. This would've been easy, but of course the width wasn't consistent. It was the same at the top and the bottom, but the cabs sort of bulged out in the middle, so I marked the moulding on the back, connected the dots with a straight edge and cut it freehand with the table saw (there was a fair amount of that kind of thing with the laminate floor too, it's easier than it sounds). As you can see, it still needs some filling and paint touch-up. Eventually I'll replace the hinges on the cabs with silver ones and paint them the same blue; currently they're just raw wood.

Below is the doorway to the vocal booth room. I haven't re-installed the door yet (weighs a ton and still needs a little work), but I wanted to show the nifty "rubber bump" threshold I got for it. Cutting it down to the correct width with the circular saw was not much fun, and when you're done, you have to sand off all the prickly pieces of excess metal with a rotary tool. Wee.

Next thing for the studio is lighting. As you can see in the top picture, it still has that atrocious ceiling fan with a dangling bulb. I've decided to do recessed lighting (yes, I love me some recessed lighting), so I'm just gonna pillage some of the five-inch cans I had intended to install in the family room (I'll buy more later). There's no attic access up there, so I'm going to play it safe and engage the services of handyman Keith. After that, I'll offically relocate my studio from the wee bedroom it's in now to up there... can't wait.

In unrelated news, AllModern finally got me replacements for my schmance Calligaris barstools. If you recall, there was an ongoing saga with the originals because the screws that held them together didn't fit in the metal inserts. Only took five months to get that worked out! I still have the other pair that are messed up so I have get them to send UPS to pick 'em up, and I'm pretty sure they've charged my credit card twice, but they've been relatively cooperative, and they even gave me an extra 30% off for all the trouble (which in truth was really all the manufacturer's fault, not theirs).

 Two major developments in the evolution of Upper Deck Studios (I think that's gonna be the official name; bonus if you get the really disgusting joke in there)...

Kinda hard to make out in this pic, but Handyman Keith and I installed the secondary front window Sunday. This is conceptually similar to the side windows, but instead of using a solid piece of glass, I ordered a modern version of the existing window (large immobile pane in the middle, smaller openable panes on either side) without any "nail fins" (that's a metal tab that sticks out so you can screw it into studs). This way I'd still have openable windows, you just have to open two separate windows. We dropped the new window onto the sill behind the existing window (in front of, I guess you'd call it... inside!) and screwed it in. This is tricky business because the somewhat-flexible frame needs to be really straight and true, otherwise the sliding windows won't open/close and seal correctly. This is the part Keith is really good at (and I'm not). Also, instead of cheesy single-pane glass like the originals, this one is double-pane low-E awesomeness with gas layer in the middle, so it'll block heat effectively. I carefully caulked and sealed all the quarter-round trim as well. With three panes of well-sealed glass, the noise transmission level is tremendously reduced. Hopefully this will prevent much sound from getting out and allow me to be semi-loud at all hours. Oh yeah, and getting the 4x8 ft window upstairs was far less traumatic than I expected. The two sliding side windows easily come out which made the weight go from oh-shit heavy to something manageable, and unlike carting drywall up there where whacking the corners is death, it wasn't such a big deal here.

Far more obviously...  there's like, a great big laminate wood floor. I'm not done, but I'm about 2/3 across the main area. As I expected, doing a big rectangle is a lot easier than doing a small room with an angled wall. This is a "floating" floor, i.e. it's not affixed to the subfloor. I know that sounds like a recipe for disaster, but in reality, it all locks together and is so heavy that it can't move. Once I learned the voodoo involved in making it lock together correctly, it was pretty easy. By far by the biggest pain (literally and figuratively) is that I have to run downstairs to the garage and grab forty-odd pound boxes of flooring every ten minutes.

Rewinding for minute, John came over Saturday and helped me finish the flooring the vocal booth... this was super tricky because of the angled wall and doorway, requiring some fancy angle cutting/notching/measuring. I only screwed up a little, but not in any really noticeable way, just some wasted flooring material. The not-so-fun part is that I get to do the angled wall/doorway notching cutting madness all over again for the other side of the doorway in the big room. There's also a little walk-in closet that I haven't posted pics of; I haven't decided whether I'm gonna do wood in there or not. I might just puss out and do cheapo 12x12 vinyl tile.

Picking up 2'x8' pieces of glass by yourself is kinda dicey business, but the (sort of) good news is that it's tempered glass which means that if you break it, you (in theory) end up with a pile of very small and non-jagged pieces, so your risk of impaling your pulmonary artery, for example, is relatively low. Since the sun is like, bright and stuff in here in the desert, I decided to tint the glass with Gila Titanium Heat Control tint. This is apparently the best stuff for blocking heat, low-E, blah blah. The tint was kinda pricey ($50); since the glass was actually a little narrower than 24", the idea was to buy one 4'x15' roll, lay it across both at once and cut it down the middle. As you can imagine, this necessitated some fancy footwork during install. Complicating matters, the tint has a clear backing on the adhesive side that has to be removed prior to application, so the idea is, peel that off, flip over the entire 4'x8' piece while keeping everything very wet with soapy water spray bottle, don't crinkle anything and don't panic, then carefully razor blade the whole mess down the middle to separate the two pieces, all of which I miraculously succeeded in doing. It should go without saying that this all would've been much easier with another body, but I was the only one here and managed to do it myself. Below should explain this much better than the preceding run-on sentence mess. This is right before I cut it in half and squeegeed out all water/air bubbles/flattened it out.

Once all that's done, you let it dry for a day and razor blade the excess off the edges. BTW, I should mention that they expect you'll be applying the tint to pre-existing windows- the fact that mine 1) weren't in frames and 2) were horizontal made this job a lot easier. It was only hard because they're so big.

Really Lester, feel free to use delicate pieces of newly tinted glass as a daybed. And yes, he did manage to leave a minor claw mark in it (there isn't currently a door to the upstairs room, and it didn't occur to me that dumbbell would want to lay on the glass). Fortunately he didn't hurt anything else.

Couple days later Handyman Keith came by, and we installed them. Basically they're held in by pieces of 3/4" quarter-round moulding in the back and the front. Keith and his awesome measuring skills set it up so the quarter-round sits flush with the wall so it looks pretty slick. As mentioned, mucking around with pieces of glass this large really puts hair on your chest!


It's kind of hard to get a good picture when you're shooting out a window (you can clearly see me in the reflection), but this should give an idea of what it looks like. And yes, I stuck a silver rubber alien in there. Forever (actually, one could theoretically open the window from the outside and remove him if necessary, but that would entail a ladder).

In the midst of all that, Keith helped me finish the booth window. Hard to tell here, but there are now two pieces of glass in there, held in pretty much the same way, but I installed a "border" of 1x2 in the middle. The hard part is cutting the quarter-round, because it's really easy to get confused cutting the 45-degree angles properly. It's time consuming too because you can't really just measure and cut, you have to estimate then keep cutting off little slivers until things fit correctly. Fortunately John loaned me his Harbor Freight Compound Mitre saw, which is great for cutting all manner of angles (you can see it on the floor in this pic). There's a whole lot of edge/corner caulking and nail patching fun after the fact too. As you can see in the pic, the nail holes are all patched up but I still have to touch up the paint. The good news is that with these windows you don't have to be careful about getting anything on the glass because it all comes off easily with a razor blade, but I don't have that luxury with the big windows because a blade would harm the tint- on those you just have to be really careful!

In case you were wondering how one nails a piece of quarter-round into place without smashing the glass, the answer is "pneumatic nail gun", which is also the awesomeness. Keith brought over (and kindly left) a small Porter-Cable air compressor and nail gun. It's a godsend for this kind of job, as well as installing moulding (more on that later).

This leaves the big front window. I spent about two days removing old crusty/paint-oversprayed tint and residue from that mess- that was a massive and tedious undertaking. Unlike the side windows, this one is a "standard" window that will be openable. It's currently in my family downstairs ready for install. Handyman Keith and I have to wrestle this monster upstairs (it's 4'x8', heavy and unwieldy and promises to be a dicey affair), then we'll install it. Stay tuned for that.

Holy moly, a wood floor! Actually a laminate wood floor (i.e. fake wood) in the booth. There's a whole big long story about acquiring this, but suffice to say, I have all the laminate for the studio, and installed this last night in the booth. The yellow part isn't done yet (that's foam underlayment), and that'll be the tricky part because the wall is angled there. The other tricky part was cutting the holes for the HVAC heating inlet/outlet, but as you can see, that's done. It entailed a fair amount of mucking around with a skilsaw and a oscillating cutting tool. Laminate floor is really heavy (I have about 800 lbs of it in my garage, literally) and installing it entails much crawling around. My back is not so happy now. I'm gonna try and finish the booth floor today.


In the meantime, I was looking for a convertible sofa/futon for the studio as a kind of "kickback" couch at the back of the room, as well as a makeshift guest bed if the need arises. I searched the internet like mad, and as usual, found lots of things that cost way more than I wanted to pay. Who would've guessed I'd find this cool thing at Target, of all places. It was online only, and was on clearance sale for half-off... would you believe $99? (plus $50 for shipping, but still a really great deal). You wouldn't mistake it as fine furniture, but it's surprisingly comfy, and the two sides are independently adjustable, which is kind of neat. Kim likes it and the cats insanely love it. (btw, it's not as purpley as it looks in the pics) I don't plan on moving it upstairs until the floors are all done, but Kim wants me to leave it downstairs permanently! Apparently Target sold out of them as I can't find it on their site now, but it's the same as this in a different color scheme.

Allllsooo.... piano guy came back yesterday, tuned the piano again, installed the missing trim parts, and more importantly, finally made the sustain pedal operational. If you don't play, this probably won't mean much to you, but trust me, a piano without a sustain pedal is kind of like having a really cool car that only goes 40 MPH. So much better now!

And finally, see all that crap on the fireplace mantel? That's three boxes of awesome glass tile for the kitchen backsplash, so that's going up pretty soon too. Projects galore!