We Have a Bedroom, at Last!

We have been busy. We spend most of that busy time working on the bedroom.

Here's what it looked like when we first moved in.

After ripping the carpet, replacing it with laminate, painting the walls and filling it with some furniture, it now looks like this.

We love love love the floor and the wall color. Just the paint and the flooring alone changed the room so much. It now feels more like it's ours.

Ever since he was a child, Vee has always wanted a black bedroom. But came painting time, his family vetoed his black bedroom proposal. I couldn't bring myself to agree to a black bedroom at first, but several awesome pictures were all it took to convince me. I mean, look at these and tell me they're not breathtakingly chic.

Jenna Lyons' home as featured on Canadian House and Home website.

A living room from March/April 2011 issue of Lonny Magazine.

I couldn't agree to stark black, but we reached a happy agreement with dark gray (Benjamin Moore Kendall Charcoal). It does make the room seem smaller, but it feels really cozy now and isn't that how a bedroom should be?

When painting, we removed some fittings and found that the room was once yellow before it was painted pale blue.

I love finding things like this. I can only imagine the next owner painting the room years from now and discovering dark gray paint underneath and wondering whether the previous painters (that would be us) were mad.

We also replaced the cheap-looking, yellowing plastic shutters with bamboo Roman blinds (Serenity Privacy Roman Blinds by Frontier Blinds). We scored the blinds at a 60 percent discount at the local Rona store, so it was only a little over $30.

Our building management only allows white and cream window treatments to make the windows all look uniform from the outside. We couldn't find any white blinds we like, and then I saw that Thrifty Decor Chick had successfully spray-painted some bamboo blinds. So we decided to spray-paint the bamboo blinds white, but that didn't go exactly according to plan.

First, we couldn't get even coverage, so we had to go back to the store to get a spray-paint gun. By the way, that thing is the shiz; it's a must-have for spray painting. Get it and your fingers will thank you for not subjecting them to the torture that is holding a spray-paint can nozzle for longer than one minute. The gun really helped me get an even coverage. The trick is to apply a steady pressure on the trigger, putting on two to three thin coats and working in sections. But even after going through the second can, I had only finished painting one side of the blinds.

Uneven paint coverage, BSPG (before spray-paint gun).

The good thing is that the bamboo was tightly woven and the white paint didn't get on the other side at all. So with one side already painted white, we decided to leave the other side bare. It was easier that way, and we also figured the natural bamboo color would look good in the bedroom.

Looks perfectly white from outside!

And the tight weave has another perk: it provides excellent light block.

We can wake up as late as we want!

With proper flooring and window covering, the bedroom is now functional. Everything we've done so far has turned out great and we love it maybe a little too much.

10 Ways to Mess Up a Bathroom Caulk Job

Our bathroom has a line of grout along the joint where there should be caulk instead. Grout, usually used to fill gaps between tiles, doesn't expand and will definitely crack when the bathtub or the tiled surface expands and contracts. Nobody should ever apply grout where the tiled surface meets the bathtub, but apparently this is a pretty common mistake. Just look at this cracking horror.

Because cracks can lead to water seeping into the drywall and rotting the building material, we decided to remove the grout and apply caulk instead. We set out thinking this would be an easy job that would take 10 minutes, max. We ended up taking a few days and messing up our caulk lines.

To help anyone looking to get artistically uneven caulk lines, we put together a short how-to.

1. Watch some caulking videos on Youtube and go, "Huh, that looks so easy, I'll nail it in no time."

2. Be a cheapskate and just buy the caulk in a squeeze tube because the pros in the videos use so little of the stuff.

3. Apply a fat bead of caulk along the joints because the tube opening is too big to easily control.

4. Scrap off all the caulk you just applied because it's beyond ugly and reapply until you use up all the caulk in the tube.

5. Remove all the caulk you applied and tell yourself you'd do it right next time.

6. Buy the correct products: caulk, caulk gun and tape.

7. Paste tape along the edges where the caulk will go.

8. Apply a squiggly, uneven line of caulk between the tape.

9. Use a coin that's too large for the job to remove the excess caulk. This helps you get bulging caulk edges because the flatter, narrower areas of the applied caulk is on the tapes.

10. Remove the tape and discover the beautifully messy caulk job.

Bonus points if you decide to live with the crazy caulk job because you haven't been showering for three days and you urgently need your regular showers back.

Double bonus points if you manage to get your hands to look like this.

Heaps of extra points if you got a fluffy white cat to condescendingly inspect your handiwork.

 PS: The videos on YouTube are actually really good; the fault lies entirely in us and our shaky hands. Some helpful videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XIf0deyzx4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TZL2yipTzE

Beautiful, Beautiful Floor

After almost two months of on-and-off work, our laminate floor project is finally done! This was a very big project for two people who didn't even own a screwdriver not too long ago. It took much longer than we thought, and for the first two weeks we had to live entirely in the living room because the bedroom had no proper flooring.

And that was why our living room looked like this...

Frat house? No. Try again.

Yep. That's where we slept. On the mattress on the floor. And right next to the "bed" was the sofa, which became our "wardrobe" since we didn't have anywhere to store our clothes yet.

We're really glad it's done, although it took much longer than we thought it would. We're really proud of ourselves, too. It's not a bad job, if I may say so myself.

Em checking to see whether our work was acceptable.

Some parts are kinda wonky...

Incredibly uneven lines!

But nobody will see these parts because they'll be out of sight once we install new baseboards.

Some parts we can't take credit for because a friend happens to have an uncle who works in construction and is willing to work in exchange for some shoes. Yes. Shoes. Vee gets many free shoes from his workplace and our friend's uncle happens to have the same shoe size. How great is that?

Somewhere along the way, Vee and I automatically divided tasks. I did the measuring and he did the cutting, then we did the installing together. It worked out faster that way. Also, Vee likes them boys' toys and I'm pretty good with numbers. The factory line model is not used worldwide for no reason, people.

By the way, Jay remarked that I was "very cool" for getting down and dirty with the flooring installation because he says girls don't usually do stuff like that. Few things please me more than being the anti-stereotype, laminate flooring finally installed being one of these few things.

Junk in the Trunk

When we moved in, the storage area was already full. After we removed the carpet and dumped everything in there, we couldn't open it without risking getting rolls of nasty carpet falling on top of us.

So we got the folks from junk removal to, uh, remove the junk. Before they left, the following conversation happened.

Junk Removal Guy #1: I didn't lock the door.
Me: Oh that's okay, you guys emptied it so it's not like there's anything to steal.
Junk Removal Guy #2: But if tomorrow you see it's full of somebody else's junk, you know who to call. *cryptic smirk*
Me: What? Does that happen?
Junk Removal Guy #2: *silently walks away, smirk still on*

Two weeks later, I saw this sign pasted on the building elevator.

The first paragraph says: "Someone has placed items into the locker #222 and put a padlock on the door." The rest of the notice basically requests that whoever put their stuff in there remove it.

I laughed out loud by myself in the lift that day, because I, funnily enough, got the answer to my question pretty promptly. Also, as horrible as this sounds, because it wasn't my locker that was filled with somebody else's junk. I probably wouldn't have laughed it if was.

Laminate Flooring and Baseboard Heaters

After much, much, much thought, here's how we did the part of our laminate flooring that's right by our baseboard heaters.

 
We decided on doing it this way only after a long process. First, we drew on our limited DIY experience and thought long and hard. Then, like any other 21st-century person who is stumped on anything, we did some Googling. Then, we called several home improvement stores for advice.

When installing laminate flooring against the wall, you're supposed to leave a small gap so the material can expand and contract with different conditions. You then cover the gap later by installing baseboard molding.

Our first plank with the spacers against the walls.

This was pretty straightforward when it was just against the walls, but we weren't sure what to do when we got to the baseboard heater: end the flooring right before the heater so we leave a gap between the flooring and the baseboard heater OR slide the flooring underneath the heater? If we slide it underneath the heater, would the flooring expand and dislocate the heater? If we leave a gap, how do we cover the gap?

It just seemed like nobody knew how to do it. Googling resulted in nothing; just similar questions with no answers. We had to call three different home improvement stores before we got a good answer.

First store: Home Depot #1
Home Depot (HD): "You need to leave as much space as possible between the flooring and the heater."
Me(M): "How much?"
HD: "As much as possible. Hold on (She asks associate: "Hey, how much space between flooring and heater?...Okay.") Yeap. About 3 inches."
M: (Decided the Home Depot person either didn't understand my question or didn't know what she was talking about.) "Okay, thanks."

Second store: Home Depot #2
HD: "So is the heater on the floor?"
M: "No, it's a baseboard heater. It's on the wall, but really low so there's very little space underneath. It's just enough for the laminate, but the laminate won't have space to expand."
HD: "Okay...So the laminate, it's on the floor or the wall?"
M: "Uhh...on the floor." (At this point decided she also didn't know what she was talking about and stopped listening.)

Third store: Rona
Rona (R): "You can do it either way."
M: "But if I leave a gap between the laminate and the heater, then how do I cover the gap?"
R: "Well, you gotta sacrifice something, right?"
M: "Um yeah...but is there a way to cover the gap?"
R: "You can use a quarter-round molding. Just glue it to the laminate."
M: "I didn't think of that!"
R: "If you don't use the heater, then you can probably get away with sliding the laminate underneath 'cos it won't expand too much."

So that was how we finally discovered a good way to handle the baseboard heater situation. We were ready to accept that it was some sort of an industry secret that professional laminate floor installers guard with their lives to preserve the profession. That Rona guy was a lifesaver.

This is how the flooring looks when you get closer.

We still have to install some quarter-round molding around the heaters, but we can live with the gap for now while we tackle more urgent projects. After the molding goes on, I imagine it'll look seamless and the floor will have enough room to expand.