Teeny Tiny Tiles

The week and weekend has flown by and a lot has been accomplished. The bad news is that the bedroom didn't get painted as fast as I had hoped. There were a lot of areas to patch up and cracks along one of the upper corner seams. EZ Patch saved the day and it all look really good.

My gamble with the red accent wall was well worth it too...although it took a worrisome 4 coats and an additional trip to Sherwin Williams. So, everyone ended up crashing at Jens. Here's a few pics of the 'blood' being applied.



Teeny tiny tiles were the good news theme this weekend...and it's great they come on 1 ft x 2 ft sheets. Dad and I learned a few things about tiling from Uncle Steve and the bathroom made a lot of progress. It's exactly what I thought it would turn out to be...awesome! Here's a shot of Dad in action.


One of the humorous moments of the project this weekend was Dad hauling out a toilet for me from Michigan until I decide what I want to get. Just imagine the look on people walking by when we hauled a toilet out of the car and Uncle Steve was sitting on the throne, guarding all our stuff as the rest of us hauled it up to the apartment.

Humor aside, it was good that he brought it out as I found out it just fits with the tank touching the wall.

It's nice to have a toilet again though instead of running to the neighbors, down the street to Jen's or...well, you know...

Finished Floors - Finale

It's been a jet setting week and a bit going through London, Oslo and Copenhagen and the week before it all was a trip trip to Belize. Yeah....haven't done much with the apartment.

While I was gone though, I did have the rest of the floor refinished (bedroom, closets and foyer). Jen was able to take some pics during the sanding progress. It's crazy to see how much paint was on the wood floor in the closets.


The finished floor looks great! The only odd thing is that they didn't lighten up as much as the living room did, but they are still a lot lighter and in a far superior condition to what they were.


My Dad and Uncle Steve are coming out this weekend to help with tiling mainly and odds and ends. My goal is to get the bedroom painted this week so people can sleep here this coming weekend, assuming we get a toilet installed after tiling too. It's ambitious, but could happen.

Looking forward to this half of the apartment being painted too and using both areas of the apartment.

Pretty Paint

The finishing touches are happening, mainly in the form of paint in the kitchen and living room. It's all looking amazing!

Bryant's advice on color choices was wonderful and after slapping a few samples on the wall, we narrowed down the the colors for the whole apartment. I used my painting contractor connection again and bought paint at Sherwin Williams.

If you're curious, here are the colors for each room.


Jen helped me paint the living room and kitchen and we were able to get all of the walls and ceiling done in just one weekend which is pretty darn cool. Here's an interim progress pic.


Unfortunately, I've been lagging behind on the bathroom and I'm still without a toilet and shower. It's not too bad since I've been able to stay nearby and use my neighbor's facilities when they are around. I've got another few trips coming up so I'm eager to get the rest of the flooring repaired and refinished while I can't physically do anything.

I'll start shuffling stuff out from the bedroom to the living room again slowly.

Stitched Up

I called in sick yesterday to work on the bathroom drywall and tileboard to get this thing moving. It was all going great until I nearly cut my thumb off.

It was pure stupidity on my part. I didn't have a carbon blade to properly cut the tileboard so I was using a Stanley knife which did the trick, but required a lot of force. It was also just after 5 PM (yeah, I broke the construction hour rules again) and I was fairly tired and not wearing gloves.

Idiot!

With one strong stroke and a small slip the Stanley knife went right across the T-square and across my thumb on a diagonal. I immediately jumped up for t-shirt to compress it and ran it under water. I called my neighbor to help me bandage it up and after a bit of inspection figured it might be a good idea to head to the ER, which is luckily a 10 minute walk away. Sitting in a chair for nearly 4 hours in
ER is an experience I don't want to relive, especially since (a) I was in 'Fast Track' and (b) the mental patient ward was right next to my waiting area. So I saw enough weird stuff for one day.


The damage added up to 6 stitches in my thumb and a sliced finger nail. It hasn't been a good few months for my left hand after whamming my other finger with a hammer when installing the wood floor.


Yet, almost all the drywall and tileboard is up. Fair trade...???

Finished Floors

I arrived back home from Aspen late last night and didn't get a chance to go to the apartment and see the floors. I went straight away after work today and was so pretty stoked to see how it turned out.

The area around the radiator that needed to be repaired turned out great. I'm also really pleased how it all lightened up nicely too.



Now the floor is done, I'm going to get onto painting. I've scheduled some time with my interior designer friend, Bryant, to talk about paint colors for the whole apartment. I still don't like making these types of decisions so I think I'll leave them to Bryant.

Refinishing Progress

I just got a message from my neighbor who is overseeing the floor refinishing for me while I'm gone. He took a quick snap of the refinished floors in the living room and kitchen. Not going to post it here as I'm sure it's not representative of the real thing, but it looks awesome and I can't wait to see it in person!

Bathroom Progress....Finally

I've been able to get all the framing in the bathroom up this week and it's looking fairly plumb. Like the ceiling, the lathe has come in handy to level out the shower wall. I was concerned about being able to conceal the cold water plumbing. The main riser is by the toilet and runs all the way around the bathroom to the tub and sink, but I seem to have framed it all out just enough to hide all the copper.

The other small challenge was deciding what to do for a medicine cabinet. The surface mounted one looked hideous before and I didn't want to integrate it with a mirror. I've seen some neat ones online that are concealed by a picture frame, but they were too deep for my shallow NYC walls and far too expensive. For the moment I've framed out my an area beside the sink for a custom medicine cabinet when I get around too it. I just need to cut a bit of laminated wood to fit in there, so it should be fairly easy when the time is right.

So now it's time for drywall and tileboard. I'll tackle this over the next few weeks as I'm traveling quite a bit still and I want to use that time to get the floors refinished. Time to start stacking everything into the bedroom! Yikes!

Blackhole Bathroom

After shelling out money to contractors, the major repairs to the bathroom plumbing and flooring is done. I used the same plumber as I had for the work in the kitchen and he finished things off in a day which was great so I didn't loose all my running water in the apartment.

The floor was also done quickly, but a bit trickier. I hired the same contractor that I used to install my recessed lighting back at the early beginnings of the project. His crew were very professional, on time, and clean. They ripped out the whole concrete subfloor and tiling, installed a new standing waste valve for the tub (that's a drain valve if you're not familiar with that term) and poured a new floor all in one day.

The new floor has helped two fold by leveling the floor and sealing up piping penetrations, reducing noise traveling up from the apartment below (not that there was much before, but you can certainly tell the difference).

With the floor and plumbing finished it's time to finish framing out walls for drywall and tile board. The small space and odd brick corners is going to make it a bit tricky and time consuming, but it's nothing that won't be done in a couple evenings and some noisy mornings of sawing and screwing.

Color this, color that

Work on the apartment has been dormant. The plumber is coming soon and it has been made clear to me the bathroom floor is beyond simple repair and will need to be torn up. So, the most recent activity has been making decisions on tile and bath fixtures and counting down the days until I loose the toilet.

This weekend has been filled with making decisions which I don't like to make on bathroom tiles, fixtures, etc. Yesterday I took a trip up to the Bronx to look at tile after a few unsuccessful tries in the city. Luckily, this store had everything I was look for. I picked out a small gray mosaic tile, 1" x 1" for each tile. I'm thinking this with a white or light grey grout will really help the chrome fixtures pop off the walls. The price point is right too, just under $5 per sq. ft. Way better then the stuff I was looking around $20 per sq. ft.

With the tiles picked out, I had to tackle the bathtub spout and valve. In order for my plumber to do the work that needs to be done, this also had to be picked out since a new water mixing valve is needed. So, after looking long and hard at Restoration Hardware, I picked out the following 'vintage' tub spout and handle.


Unfortunately, it was more expensive then all the tile I'll need to do the wall and floor...and the set didn't include the shower head. I'm beginning to understand why bathrooms are so expensive to renovate.

The Joys of the Noise

After returning home from vacation, I received a letter from the building's managing agent that he had received complaints from people in the building I was making construction noise on weeknights and weekends. He kindly reminded me of our stupid construction hours (8 AM - 5 PM Mon-Fri, no work on any public holidays) and stated that further complaints would result in legal action.

I was pretty ticked off at first and rampant that there are so many people who aren't forward thinking about improving our property and their apartments. Here I am, a young 20 something guy trying to make a better place to live and eventually get a nice return on his investment and I've run into so much opposition, it's not even funny.

But then I realized I've gotten away with a lot of stuff the past year. I've sucked all I can out of the NYC Department of Sanitation, done construction on weekends for almost a year now, received my own building permits from the NYC Dept of Buildings and was able to convince the Board of Directors to let me do all the renovations to my apartment on my own (given that I follow regular working hours and raise my insurance....I did the latter). Not bad.

So, if my fellow neighbors can't get it and are whining about noise, then I'll abide by the rules...and ensure that I start any construction which may be noisy at 8 AM. Since my neighbor below me has been the real complainer, I'm sure he'll enjoy power saws, drilling, etc. at that hour.

Ah, the joy of living in NYC.

Bombing the Bathroom

It's been a long week and as you can tell I've been pretty busy. The bathroom has been the focus this week since it's really all that is left in the major construction picture.

So, after cleaning up the mess from the weekend Monday and Tuesday, I dug into the bathroom on Wednesday night. I quickly found that Travis's work over the holidays eased the process since most of what was left was plaster on lath and some tile on tileboard.

The shower wall proved to be the most difficult as the tile was on a greenboard and cementboard in some places.

Friday night I finished up the demo and Saturday was spent bagging what was left up and working on electrical and insulation. Sunday was more electrical which resulted in two trips to Home Depot which took forever compliments of slow work on the A train.

I woke up early today to tidy things up and get ready for Roy to help me hand the ceiling drywall. It took us 2 hours to cut the drywall and hang it with the main challenge being working in such a small space with one person on a ladder in the bath tub, another on a sawhorse and attempting to vault it up around corners and over the steam pipe.

After a bit of struggling, we got it all into place and it feels good to have gone from demo to insulated, re-wired with a ceiling in less then a week.

Still, there is a lot of work to do so I can get a sink back and not have to take baths (I've never taken so many baths in my life as I have this week!). It looks like the plumbing for the bath tub will need to be replaced and the subfloor has holes and oddities around the edges.



I have a few contractors coming this week to look at these elements and give their opinion.

In the meantime, I'll haul the bombed out debris to the curb each night this week and shop for tiles.

This is where I poop

Enough said for now.

If Picasso taped and mudded...

If Picasso taped and mudded his seams would probably look like the ones my dad did in a modern art style. OK, they weren't perfect but the having help with that process certainly kept things on schedule and moving forward these past 2 weeks after Christmas. Last weekend I finished mudding and sanding the kitchen and slapped on 2 coats of primer.

This week was some more mudding of the living room and yesterday was a full 8 hours of sanding and priming.

But now it looks great and I'm super pleased with how it all turned out and turned around so quickly. It took me from March - October to do bedroom from demo to primed drywall. The kitchen and living room only took me from the end of October to January! Maybe I learned something along the way...like rent a dumpster...as well as the process in general I'm sure.

So now the saga of the bathroom starts. I'm sure it will be interesting as I lose functionality in there and will need to figure out where to shower and do my #1 and #2. I may find myself showering at work quite often.

The goal is to get all the demo done in there and also get the work done on capping the dumbwaiter before I get any floors refinished. Ideally floor refinishing will happen while I'm gone in Aspen.

We'll see what the week brings us.