Scary Cabin

Or maybe he’s in the trim work. I don’t know, but this past weekend was pretty much nothing but trim/detail work and it’s not even close to being done.

We started with baseboards. Since the pocket door trim in the back bedroom isn’t done, we can’t do baseboard yet on that wall, but the other three walls of the back bedroom have no such restriction. Since two of the walls need more than 8 ft. of baseboard, the 16 footers needed to be cut down to size. Probably should have moved the saw to the deck, but instead moved the 16 ft. boards to the upstairs front bedroom and cut them there, then carefully moved them downstairs without scraping too much paint off the walls. The next room to get some baseboard love was the upstairs bathroom. That’s small enough to use 8 ft boards, but because of how the vanity is placed and the fact that the vanity has a low drawer, the baseboards needed to be trimmed by about 1/4” so cut to size, haul them down to the utility room, trim off the 1/4”, haul them back up and install. By install, I mean nail them to the wall. Making it look nice is a long processes. Next all the nail holes need to be filled, then sanded, and finally painted. Once all that is done, the top and edged get caulked. All in it was probably 4 -5 hours of work just for the baseboard in those two rooms.

While waiting for filler and/or paint to dry we did more detail work in the upstairs bath. The towel bar was installed. We had installed blocking in the wall so it went on pretty easy and is nice and sturdy. Genny wanted to use the same tile that we used for the kitchen back-splash to make a back-splash for the vanity, so we dug out some of that and made a back-splash. This highlights one of the big problems with a remodel, the existing walls in the bathroom are not square, not even close. The vanity fits in the corner (barely) and the corner has a gap of at least 3/4”. We’re talking 3/4” out of square over 18” of wall. Yeah, I would think you could eyeball it closer than that. We needed to fill that with something or the tile would just slide down the wall. Not wanting to break out the tile saw, the pieces were all trimmed using the tile nips. Other than the gap (mind the gap!) it looks pretty good but still needs grout. The last detail in the bathroom was the transition strip between the bathroom tile floor and the laminate in the hall.

Finding the right ceiling fans for the cabin involved quite a search. We found one at HomeDepot and bought it for the downstairs. Then decided that we wanted the same fan for each upstairs bedroom. Of course the local HD didn’t have any more and no due date for any to arrive. We managed to fine one HD in the area that still had some… Lucky! The only issue with these ceiling fans is that they come with a cheap-ass remote as the only way to control them. It has issues like a single button that controls the light. Pressing the light button will toggle the light on or off. But holding it will dim and brighten the light. It makes getting the light level you want a challenge. There is an easy fix for this minor issue. Replace the fan/light controller with something better. Lutron makes a fairly nice in-wall switch that has separate switches for the fan and light. It also has a dim/bright rocker to adjust the brightness and has a high/low rocker to adjust the fan speed. As a bonus, it has 7 fan speeds instead of the normal 3. It requires a normal 12/2 or 14/2 wire between the switch and the fan so it will work with most installations. We installed this in place of the original fan controller this weekend. As a bonus, this fixed a problem with the original controller where it would flash the fan’s light when there was Insteon traffic on the power line. Unfortunately, this controller won’t work in the bedrooms because we don’t have a wire from the switch location to the fan. But an Insteon FanLinc will work up there and should provide for better control than the original.

We also attempted to re-wire the dinning table light. The original wire/chain is too short which leaves the light a bit too high. W thought that we could use a replacement chain/wire kit but turns out the wires are permanently attached to the light socket which means some soldering will be required. Also, the chain in the kit was lighter duty than the original so we opted to skip it for now and look for something better.

The shed has become home to some furry creatures. They were making nests in the cabinet drawers. Most had some insulation and what looked like raccoon droppings. One has a mouse that scurried away, not to be seen again and what looked like a squirrel carcass. Fun times cleaning that up.