Our Micro-Disasters Finally Find Resolutions…With LASERS!
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 36)
Some More Painting Accomplishments
For the holiday week, I decided to use up some of my hoarded vacation time to try and get as much done at the house as possible. My goal was to complete one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor so that Brandon and I could actually move my bedroom furniture in from our Bungalow in Royal Oak and actually spend the night at the house. Bree had the goal of finishing the master bathroom that she decided would be her personal pet project at the house.
Early on in the week, Bree was finally about to get the master bathroom completely painted. Our dark navy walls, white trim, marble floors, and brass sconces all look great! A problem with our shower will cause us to have to do some touch ups now, but we’ll get to that later.
My goal of finishing a bedroom went a little slower than I planned. I expected to have some more help on my side from Brandon and my mother and sister who were coming into town for the holidays. Unfortunately, Brandon’s work on the week of Black Friday meant he would be too busy to help much at the house during the day and an unexpected death of a close family friend, meant my mother and sister could only come for a day to help rather than 3 or 4 days.
I focused my efforts on this room each day and sanded and scraped little by little on my own. After putting a coat of trim paint on the baseboards and casings, instead of putting on a second coat, I had a brain fart and accidentally coated everything with a coat of primer again instead. I got about 1/2 way around the room before it hit me, so that put a hit on my speed as well. Fortunately, after a little more elbow grease it all ended up just fine. My mother and sister helped me get the first coat of color on the walls and the next day after they left, I did the second coat. This room was the room that had been completely gutted from the water damage, so the transformation from where we started is very dramatic!
Next up with paint, my focus is on finishing our 2nd floor laundry so that our washer and dryer can be installed Monday next week. So far I have the ceiling painted, but now I will need to do some sanding and patching of trim.
Kitchen Woes
With our kitchen essentially complete, we still had a couple bumps in the road that had to be sorted out to make it fully functional. Our biggest concern quickly became our range, which after all of our work with picking it out over 10 months ago, planning our kitchen around it, and all of our cabinet and counter top installation, we had a major problem. The slide-in range is supposed to — what do you know — slide in, and then the feet are lowered down into position so that the top stainless steel flange of the range actually sits on the surface of the counter top. This gives you a flush, built-in look. After we slid in the range, we realized we’d made a huge, tiny mistake.
Hopefully in these photos you can see what I’m talking about. Given that our 90 year old home doesn’t have perfectly flat floors, when our cabinets were installed the bottoms had to be planed down in order to sit flush and flat on the floors of our kitchen. This small amount of material being removed meant that our cabinet height was slightly lower than we originally planned for. We didn’t realize until counter tops were installed and the range was slid in, but now our range, even when lowered as low as it could possibly go, wouldn’t reach the counter top. We were off by about 1/8". We discussed cutting our flooring, but realized that in doing so we’d prevent the lower drawer of our range from being opened.
We quickly looked at other options, we could:
- Find a new range that fit our height requirements
- Tear our counter tops and backsplash to adjust the height
- Tear our flooring and lose use of our double oven bottom drawer
- Fill the gap with something
Finding a different range proved impossible. Every competing slide-in range had the same if not higher requirements for counter tops, meaning we were stuck with this one without having to deal with other cascading issues like removing counter top material in the back, or having unfinished edges on our quarts that were supposed to be covered by the range.
Tearing out countertops and backplash was a no-go at this point, for what I hope is obvious reasons. Tearing out flooring was similarly hard to justify.
So, fill the gap. We went to Home Depot and bought some various gasket materials — things meant to be used on door jams for draft and whatnot. After spending a few hours with that stuff, we realized that getting it to work would be difficult, getting it to look good would be impossible. I decided to call a metal shop and ask about making a stainless part to fill the gap, after a roughly $300 quote I decided that might bee too big a price to pay if there was another option. I finally came up with an idea I thought could be doable. In school, I had used a laser cutter many times to make displays, stands, and bases for my models, and thought that maybe a black acrylic cut to the shape of the range stainless top would be the perfect controlled gap filler for our situation.
I called an old family friend, Phil, who owns an amazing sign making business in Columbus, PR Signs & Service. I knew he had a laser cutter and he agreed to cut me the part if I provided the file. I made a template of the range, and then a digital file and sent it to Phil to be cut out of 1/4" black acrylic material. Within couple days, I had the part and Brandon installed it between the range and counter tops.
Overall, this solution worked great! It filled the gap, provided a clean black gasket line, and honestly, I don’t know if you’d ever know the range wasn’t just manufactured this way if you didn’t know it. This fix ended up costing us about $120 in materials and labor, and I think it looks great! Our range now fits perfectly and functions great! We even made a pizza, some enchiladas, and pies this week to celebrate our success!
Shower Woes
A few days after our master bathroom shower was installed, we began to notice some issues, small micro-fractures in our tile. At first we noticed only a couple on one wall, figuring it could be fairly easily fixed, but as the days rolled on we noticed a few more, then more, and then even more. After a couple weeks it had turned from 5 or 6 damaged tiles to about 30%. Cal and Christian, our contractors, reassured us they’d get to the bottom of the issue. After a few visits from the tile supplier and then tile manufacturer, it was determined that the poor quality of the tile could not hold up to the high strength of the thin set mortar used to put it up. As the thin set dried, it was cracking and even imploding some of our subway tile. A deal was struck, and it was decided that the entire shower would need to be redone.
So this week Val got to work with a complete tear out and redo. It was hard to watch all of this hard work get demoed, the thin set was so strong that it looked like he was essentially chiseling at concrete for hours and then days on end to get it all out. By the end of this week, Val had the shower completely removed and as of yesterday, almost all of the tile has been reinstalled. Virginia tile gave us a different, higher-end brand of subway tile to use instead, so Val has been working hard to get this shower done for us quickly. By the end of this week, Val should be finished and plumbing can reinstall our fixtures next Monday when they come to install our washer/dryer.
Next Up…
I will be focusing on the laundry, pink guest bathroom, and our walk-in closet. With the bedroom done, I can officially work on moving my bedroom things in and I am planning on using the last of my vacation days to do so. I am really hoping we can have the closet worked out quickly so that we can have a place to put our things while the remainder of painting and construction happens around us. With the kitchen essentially done and our master bath done by next Monday, there’s not much standing in our way from spending the night here in the very near future!
Our Journey isn’t over!
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