Monthly Archives: September 2008

Carpet!

  By jaguar | September 26, 2008 - 3:06 pm |
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The last thing to happen with the familiy room before we went on our vacation was the carpet.    Choosing our carpet turned out to be the easy part, finding a place to buy it turned out to be quite hard.   After hearing some bad stories regarding the Lowes/Home Depot contractors, we deceded to get our carpet from a dedicated flooring place.  Our quest began at the closest carpet store, Avalon Carpet, Tile, and Flooring, in Cherry Hill.   There we looked at all the carpet and quickly decided on some SmartStrand carpet from Mohawk.  Everything about this carpet seemed perfect, it felt really soft, had great wear ratings, and was supposed to be very stain resistant.  The SmartStrand fiber is made from corn, so its even more environmentally friendly.  After talking with the saleswoman we got a quote for about $2,000.

This seemed rather expensive to me, but we really liked the carpet so I wasn’t overly concerned.  I did however think that we should go to another store just to check and make sure we didn’t see anything better.  Therefore we went to Kepple’s Carpet in Marlton.  After looking around a bit we didn’t see anything we liked better, and since they had the same carpet, we asked the salesman for a quote on that too.  Well he ran the numbers and came up with about $1500.  I thought this was great, the exact same carpet, and its alot cheaper too!  We were sold, but Jess wanted to think about the color for a little while, so I told the salesman we wanted to think about it.   He seemed to take this to mean it was to expensive, and after offering to show us other options which we declined, he got rather rude and irritating.

Jess and I left with a bit of a conundrum.  We didn’t really want to deal with that salseman, but we also didn’t want to pay an extra $500 for the same thing.  We spent the next few weeks stewing about it, and trying to find another store to go to.  Turns out there really weren’t any other carpet stores in the Cherry Hill area, and the next closest place was like 20 minutes away.  Being from New Jersey I’m used to everything being around the block and I was worried the store that far away wouldn’t want to come all the way down to install the carpet.  We warily drove up to Carpet Dimensions & Flooring, where we met with Rob, who couldn’t have been nicer.  Not only that, but the quote he gave us was for $1100.  We immediately signed up, and he was even nice enough to let us take the sample board home so we could choose a color (we ended up with Cigar Shop).  He came buy a few days later to measure, and then called to schedule the installation.   The guys came by and did a great job with the install, and we quite happy with it.

Electric Skylight Shades

  By jaguar | September 25, 2008 - 1:56 pm |
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Our family room will be doubling as our home theater. Because of this the lovely skylights that we put in, which do a wonderful job lightening up the room, can also make the TV hard to see or make ugly glares on it. To combat this when we ordered our Velux skylights, we also ordered a pair of solar powered electric shades for them. These were quite expensive, about $300 a piece (only a few dollars less than the skylights themselves) so I hope we like them. We could have gotten manual ones, but they didn’t offer any full light blocking ones, and I think its gonna be really cool to lay on the couch and close the blinds. The shades work wonderfully, completely blocking even direct sunlight (technically I think its 98% but close enough). They were also easy to install, with the very easy to follow instructions, which oddly reminded me of those included in a Lego set.

Baseboard

  By jaguar | September 24, 2008 - 1:11 pm |
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While I was busy spackeling, sanding, and painting, Jess was hard at work cutting, staining and sealing the baseboard and the door trim.   As soon as I was finished painting, I was then able to install all of the trim in just a few minutes, thanks to my brad nailer.  The trim has two coats of American Walnut stain on it, and then three coats of Minwax Wipe-On Polyurethane.  I was very happy with the Wipe-on Poly.  Its extremaly easy and fool-proof to apply, and although it needs multiple coats, it can be done with just a rag and doesn’t show any brush strokes. However it is rather expensive, and after reading up on it, I’ve learned that it is just regular oil based polyurethane thinned with mineral spirits.  Next time I will probably by the much cheaper regular polyurethane and thin it myself.

Paint!

  By jaguar | September 23, 2008 - 4:37 pm |
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We’ve been on vacation in Seattle (pictures will be up soon!) for the last two weeks so I haven’t made any updates to the blog.  However before we were gone I was able to paint the family room.  We (and by we I mean Jess, while I smiled and nodded) choose a nice blue color.  I think it looks pretty good, and should look great with the dark brown carpet and the dark wood trim.  It should also keep the room nice and bright, which is a concern since the old room was so dark.  This time around we used the Behr paint from Home Depot.  No real reason than them having a paint chip that Jess liked.  Bonus was that it happened to be on sale when I got it.   So far I’ve used both the regular and the premium Valspar paints from Lowes, as well as the Regal paint from Benjamin Moore.  I think the Regal paint was the best, but the Behr seems next best.

Staining Window Trim

  By jaguar | September 9, 2008 - 1:11 pm |
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In the past I’ve always painted the trim in the other rooms of the house.  However for this room the wife decided that she wanted the trim to be all stained.   We picked out a nice dark walnut colored stain and proceeded to order all of our windows and skylights in unfinished pine.  I’ve stained pine in the past, and generaly have had good results, although it can get a bit blotchy.  I know you can use a wood conditioner overwash, however that also makes the end result be lighter, and we wanted it to look nice and dark.  All of the other molding we stained turned out acceptably, and the skylights turned out beautifully.  The Andersen window we got was quite the disappointment though.  The main rail looks terrible, and the bottom rails are quite different shades.  I suspect this comes down to the poor qualitly of wood used by Andersen in the construction of the window.    The good news however is that the center rail is acutaly just a trim piece tacked on with a few brads.  That meant that I was able to pop it off, and I can replace it with a higher qualitly piece of wood that should look great.

Primer!

  By jaguar | September 8, 2008 - 2:08 pm |
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Well after spending almost a whole month taping the dry wall, I’m quite excited to finally be painting the walls.  When we moved in, knowing I would be doing lots of painting I bought a 5-gallon bucket of Valspar Primer from Lowes.   I didn’t really have any complaints about it, but everyone seems to use Killz instead so I thought I’d give that a try.  Used almost all of a 2-gallon bucket (on sale at Home Depot, woo!) for this room.   It didn’t seem noticeably different than the Valspar stuff.  I’m very happy with how the paint came out, there are one or two spots that I need to go back and touch up the spackle, but on the whole it looks great.  I was rather upset when I noticed two quarter sized bubbles, that turned out to be voids in the middle of the sheetrock.  I didn’t notice them while spackeling, but it seems that the primer caused the paper to expand there a bit and they now pop out a little.

Cutting the Molding

  By jaguar | September 3, 2008 - 11:23 am |
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I rather dislike doing molding.  All the measuring, cutting, measuring again, trimming, sanding and finishing is just a bit repetitive and tedious.  So when my lovely wife offered to do some work, I was quiet happy to let her get started getting the trim ready to be installed.  This works out wonderfully as it means I can concentrate on the joys of spackling, while she gets the trim all ready.  Since we’re going to be staining the trim, Jess is not only cutting it, but also staining and applying the polyurethane.  Hopefully once I prime and paint the room the trim will be all ready to go and it will just be a matter of nailing it on.  Just to prove that not only did she measure all the trim, but also used the miter saw to cut it, here’s another picture.  Doesn’t she look hot with her painting clothes and safety glasses?