Category: Projects (Page 2 of 52)

It’s my half birthday! Woo hoo! Happy Half Birthday to me!

I’m finally painting the little room off of my kitchen that I call the mudroom. It has my washer and dryer in it. When I moved in, the washer and dryer were against the south wall, so that when you went from the kitchen to the mudroom you ran right into them.

But I moved them to the east wall, so they would be out of the line of sight, making the area look more spacious as you come into it.

But I’m starting to wonder if maybe I want to move them back. There are some cabinets that the previous owner installed on the wall above the old positions. Also, there is a window in the east wall that I can’t really look out of because the washing machine is in the way. It’s a great window to look out of to see who’s ringing the doorbell.

I have to move things to paint those walls anyway, so maybe I’ll have a look at them in the old positions to see what they look like.

My handyman is done with what he was doing. He helped me rearrange the master bathroom.

The previous owner had added this bathroom, which I was grateful for. It had a door in it, which was the quickest way to the pool, before I had a sliding glass door added. The existence of that door meant there was less room for necessaries in the bathroom, and the sink was directly across from the toilet, which was just awful. I tried to mitigate the problem by getting a tiny sink, but it just wasn’t working.

So my handyman took out the door and turned it into a window, then moved the sink by the new wall, and moved the toilet so it shares the wall with the sink. The result is awesome. The bathroom feels so much bigger. He also convinced me to paint the walls white, which adds to the feeling of space.

I forgot to take “before” pictures, so I had to go back in my camera roll to search for old pictures. As it turns out, I didn’t ever take a picture of the door, but I did take a picture from the door. Here are the “befores”:

And here are the “afters”:

I love the window. It makes the bathroom so bright. I will be replacing the handles on the vanity cabinet, because Metals Must Match.

This was the Big Project of the summer, even though the handyman did most of the work. I do have some other projects I hope to accomplish. We’ll see. Time is passing so quickly…

When I had my water heater replaced, they took the old one away, and it left an empty spot outside my back door. The wall there was an old color. Yesterday I decided to paint it to match the rest of the house. I already knew what color paint I needed because of the patch job I did last summer.

Here’s the before and after:

The water pipes in my house are old and could develop a surprise leak any time now. My neighbor told me a horror story of soaked and warping hardwood floors. I did NOT want that, so I’m re-piping my house.

The plumbers did the work yesterday. They cut lots of holes in the walls:

While they were re-piping, they also installed a filter, and a tankless water heater. They take up storage space in my garage, but they will improve my water quality at home, and my eventual resale value as well. Here’s a before and after – the water heater is the thing hanging on the wall:

The old water heater was outside my back door. I’m not sure, but I think it’s not unusual for water heaters to be outside of your house in LA. Now that that tank is gone, I have a space next to my back door. I think I’ll take the metal cabinet down, but then I’ll have this whole space to do something with:

I decided I was going to rearrange my backyard pots yesterday morning, but when I got out there, I got whatever the gardening equivalent of writer’s block is. While I was looking around out there, I noticed the spot on my back wall was still unpainted. That been unpainted for… checking Bradaptation…. TWO AND A HALF YEARS? Good grief!

My challenge was to find the matching color for the stucco on my house. How do people even do that? The internet said to bring in a sample of the paint. I scouted around for broken pieces of stucco, and wasn’t having any luck, until I saw this:

The front of that electrical box actually came off! I could take it in to have the color matched. Awesome! I took it to Home Depot. The line for the paint counter was long, so I looked at the color cards and found one that almost matched, but I wanted to have the guy use the color-match machine.

The color match was too light, so I asked the guy to mix the color from the card I found. When the paint was mixed, the guy put a dab of it on the fusebox cover. It was a perfect match!

It worked! The color is indistinguishable! The texture of the patch is a little different, so you can see it the spot, but the paint color is the same! Amazing!

For the record, the stucco color on my house is Behr “Historical Gray”.