Finishing Back Door

I started by sanding the back door and taping each pane of glass.

It's amazing how much time you'll spend taping if you know you're going to put your work up on the internet for the world to see!

Finished! I figure I've got about 14 hours of work into this door. Ugh! But the finished product looks pretty good, so it was worth it. (Notice my new crystal doorknob from Rejuvenation.)

Look What I Found

We started stripping the 3 layers of wallpaper off the dining room walls this weekend and were given a happy surprise. We had long been considering putting up plate moulding and wainscotting, but I wasn't sure how "original" it would be in this house. Plus I didn't know how it would match with the archway between the dining and living room. Apparently, this house had those mouldings when it was new. The white parts in the picture are bare plaster that has never been painted, presumably because there used to be moulding there!

Splinter Repair

Did you know that SuperGlue (a.k.a. cyanoacrylate) works great on wood? I'm going to show you how I used it to repair a splinter in my moulding.

OOPS! When I nailed the lintel to the cap moulding, I didn't have it straight and on the last blow from the hammer it caused a splinter on the face of the moulding.

After I applied a liberal amount of glue to the splinter, I clamped it with firm pressure and let it sit for several hours.

Here you see the repair after the clamp is removed and the spot is sanded.

And here's the finished product. There's no sign of the boo-boo anywhere.

Quick Tip: Painter's Tape Pointer

Let's try a video Quick Tip. I apologize for the quality, but it's the best I could get out of my camera.

Now for the tip... In order to get a nice clean paint line when using painter's tape, it is very important that the tape be well-stuck to the wall. I like to use an old credit card (or one of those fake ones you get in your junk mail all the time) to "seat" the tape, especially in hard-to-reach places like around trim. Watch the video for a demo.

Marmoleum Installation: Part 3

I finally finished putting the shoe moulding around all the cabinets and the reducing moulding between the kitchen and the hardwood in the dining room.

This is the base moulding behind the refrigerator, primed, filled, and ready for paint.

Here's a nice shot of the cast iron toe-kick vent I got from Signature Hardware. Pity nobody will ever notice it.

These are all of the tools I used to install the Marmoleum, plus my power miter saw that's not in the picture. I used my 12" miter saw to make all of the full-length cuts, which required me to cut most of the way through, then rotate the piece 180-degrees and finish the cut. A table saw would have been preferable, but I don't have one.

The hack saw was very handy for cutting small notches when needed.

The big black bar is absolutely necessary. Don't even thing about installing this kind of flooring without one. You can use a piece of wood as a tapping block when laying the tiles in the middle of the floor, but when you get to the cut pieces around the perimeter of the room there is no way to tap the pieces into place without the bar. Go to your local big box and spend the $10 if you don't already have one.

Read more in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.