Well I guess it was inevitable. It seems that I have an affinity to knocking walls down. Last week while my wife was gone on vacation I decided it was a perfect time to redefine some spaces in our house. This picture is just a sneak preview, I’ll go over the whole story as soon as I get all my pictures together. Needless to say it was a huge dusty mess, and my wife was very glad that she wasn’t around.

Things are heating up in Utah. It looks like we should be hitting triple digits this week. Unfortunately for us our house has neither central air or a swamp cooler. We have been blowing cold air from our basement up the stairs to try and keep things cool, and it definitely helps. To make sleeping a little bit nicer, we decided to buy some ceiling fans. We went with the cirrus hugger from modern fan. It’s the same fan we had at our last house, and we loved them there. Installation was a breeze (luckily our boxes were already braced for a ceiling fan) and they look great in our room with our new Malm bed and dresser.
Cirrus Hugger Fans available from Y Lighting starting at $304

Malm bed and dresser available from Ikea $149 - $199

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A special thanks goes out to Salt Lake Magazine and all their staff for including me in the July/August edition. For those locals, it’s worth picking up an issue to see the best of the beehive list. Each year, Salt Lake magazine seeks out the best of everything in Utah. For 2008, they have the biggest-ever collection of the people, places and things you love about living in the Beehive State.

Best of the Beehive list is available online here.

I have had quite a few people ask for details about how we did our bases without baseboard. First off let me say that it is completely different if you are talking new construction. New construction is easy, they make a 1/2″ trim piece that keeps the drywall floated off the floor. For our house, I simply used a 6″ drywall taping knife and smoothed the wall out to the floor. There were areas where I probably added as much as 1/2″ of mud to the base to try and cover the floor boards. As long as you take it up smooth for a foot or so you don’t really pick up on the added thickness. We were lucky that on all our doorways the wood casing came all the way to the corner. You really can’t make a corner out of drywall. For existing construction, one of the problems is that your finished floor doesn’t always go completely to the wall. There were plenty of area’s in our house that were like this. In the process of mudding they got filled in, and I simply sanded them flush and finished over them when I finished the floor. It really isn’t too noticeable. I did worry a little about how the base would hold up over time, but I figured it would be cheap to repair if I ever needed to fix it. To sum it all up, it’s not perfectly clean everywhere, but I still think it looks a lot better than having base. Price wise it cost less than $50 to do 800 square feet, but a LOT of sanding and mudding.

More pictures below.

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It’s amazing how much some paint, flooring an furniture can change a space. Much like our old home, we painted everything bright white (we used Behr pure white eggshell enamel). The white paint, along with getting rid of all the baseboard make the room look so much cleaner. It’s great to finally get our furniture in the house, now we can start to get some of our artwork up and make it look like a home.

More pictures below!
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I’m off to Diamond Rental to pick up a floor sander this morning. I’ve never actually refinished any floors before, but I have talked to plenty of people that have so I figure it can’t be too hard. I hope to get them all sanded today and get our natural oil stain on. Tomorrow I will be putting on the protective finish.
If everything goes as planned I will be posting on Monday about our newly refinished hardwood floors.
Wish me luck!

I’ve never been a big fan of carpet, so even though our new house has some fairly decent carpet, one of the first things we did was to tear it all out. We knew that underneath there were hardwood floors (red oak) but we didn’t know what condition they would be in. Unfortunately when we got them uncovered we found a couple of spots that were in pretty rough shape. We were planning on just doing a nice dark stain, but depending on how they turn out after sanding we may have to fall back on our backup plan of painting them. I have a feeling though that we may just end up staining them, and getting a rug to cover the real bad spots. We hope to sand the floors this weekend, so we’ll see…
We also went ahead and tore out all the baseboard and casings around the doors, and for the past two weeks I have been mudding and sanding them smooth. It should be a much cleaner look.

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I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that we were thinking about selling our home. Even though we had just barely finished it, it seems that the grass is always greener…. We put it on Craigslist and had a really great response. We ended up having a open house a couple of days later, and had a good crowd show up. Some were just there to see our pad, but one was looking to buy. It turns out that three days after putting it on Craigslist we had a verbal offer. Since neither the buyer or myself were using a realtor it took us a little bit to work out some of the kinks, but as of last Friday we officially no longer own the home. Although it will be hard to leave such a wonderful house we still feel good about it. Initially we set out to see if a Modern styled home could be had on a common mans income, and I think that we proved with enough hard work and persistence it can. The new owner is an architect and really appreciates what we’ve done, which makes it all a little easier to swallow. In a turn of irony the home that we wanted to buy went under contract before we could snatch it. Luckily things worked out that we were able to find another great home in an amazing neighborhood. It is a vintage 50’s grandma’s home just waiting for some tasteful updating. That means that there will be plenty of DIY affordable modern remodeling posts to come.

I realized yesterday that I never put up any last pics of our bathroom to show our shower completely finished. It has been done for quite a while now, and we really love it, especially the dual showerhead. To pull the whole dual showerhead off on the cheap we ended up going with a Danze Parma shower/tub combo. The Parma has the tub diverter right next to where you turn the water on (instead of a pull up thing on the tub spout) so it makes for a clean look. Instead of diverting to a tub spout, it goes to our adjustable shower wand. Set it somewhere in between and you get dual shower heads! The tub/shower combo was around $350 and the wand was about $150. $500 isn’t exactly cheap by my standards, but compared to any other dual head systems I could find it was a steal.
More pictures after the jump.
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We always said that we would never sell our house for another fixer upper, that we would hold out for that perfect lot and build on it. Unfortunately lots are far and few between in areas that I would want to live. With that in mind I occasionally watch for houses in good areas that could become another epic GRM remodel. This last week I think I found one. We now find ourselves in a sticky situation. Before we can even put a bid on the house we need to sell ours, but we don’t want to sell our unless we can get this new one. It’s really quite frustrating. I have a feeling that this new house will sell in the next couple of weeks, so I put our house up for sale on Craigslist and Zillow just to see if I would get any bites. If we don’t end up getting a full price offer in the next couple of weeks I imagine we will just end up staying here until we can find an affordable lot in a location we would want to live.
Any advice?