Whoops
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2w ago
Just a heads up that my WordPress theme died and now the site looks dumpy. Even though I haven’t been posting, I try to keep things working. I’ll hopefully get it straightened out soon. In the meantime, let me tease you all with some projects we’ve been working on and I intend to write posts about: the front yard, the basement stairs, the basement exterior walls, the back yard concrete demo, and if we can get our act together, the garage! Stay tuned. I haven’t forgotten about this thing ..read more
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Upstairs
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
1y ago
If you aren’t a regular reader or weren’t paying close attention, you might not even notice that an entire calendar year separates this post and the previous one. What can I say? I fell off the blogging horse. What happened in the past year? Is the house done? Well, I’m not going to cover a whole year of work, but the big development is yes, just one week after the last post, we moved upstairs. One of the reasons I didn’t post right away when we moved is that people want to see pictures, and honestly, right after you move in things aren’t staged and pretty. It took us time to work through ..read more
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Stair Balusters
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
With the edging installed and the railings varnished, we moved on to balusters. I bought three different kinds of wrought iron balusters to make up a pattern: plain straight, a swirling pattern intended to tie with the front door that we called “squiggles”, and “baskets” where several pieces wrap around to make a ball. Originally I was planning to put “knuckles” for these, little diamond-shaped bits along the straight length, but Sarah liked the baskets and they were cheaper than the knuckles, which made it an easy call. I worked out a pattern and approximate quantities to order, along with “s ..read more
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Stair Edging and Finishing
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
As I mentioned a couple posts back, Sarah took on the project of adding a hardwood edging to the stairs that go from the second floor to the attic as well as the attic hallway that overlooks the stairwell. Carpeting will cover the remainder. The first step was to add a piece of veneer plywood to each step riser using glue and a stapler, next cover the holes with Drydex (spackle) and prime the wood. I mixed up some regular drywall mud and filled in the corners where the risers meet the drywall sides of the stairs. I took the opportunity to patch some dings and dents, as well as close up the too ..read more
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Stair Newels and Railings
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
In addition to the stair cladding, I also needed to do the newel posts, railings, and balusters. We’re going to have stained red oak newels and railings, and iron balusters with some spiral pieces to tie thematically with our front door. I did a bit of online research and started ordering the parts I needed. I got the newel posts from the same company that made the stair treads, we ordered balusters from a couple of companies, and the railings are from Home Depot. I also did some research on how to mount these things, since no one wants a newel post that wiggles around. There are a few options ..read more
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Getting Closer
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
I’ve been working on the stair railings, and I’ll have a post about them hopefully soon, but there’s been a bunch of other things going on we should get caught up on. For starters, we got our countertops! Sarah and I went shopping for stone countertops for the kitchen as well as the three bathroom vanities. We learned that while there are lots of installers, they all buy from distributors and the distributors won’t sell directly to you. We did some online shopping and then visited two different local distributors and figured out what we liked and didn’t. Unfortunately, the distributors only gi ..read more
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Stove Gas Line
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
This was a relatively small project. I’d left it on the back burner for a while, but since I was waiting for some (more!) deliveries to move forward with the stair railing project, I decided to knock this one out. Back when we had temporarily (several years) had the washer and dryer on the first floor, we ran a gas line up to it, using the segment that was future-intended for the stove. This meant I had an existing hole in the floor to run through up into the wet wall. The nice thing about the wet wall is that there’s room inside to work. I bought a recessed box for the gas valve a while back ..read more
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Kitchen Cabinets
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
After my sister Jessica helped us assemble the upper cabinets and Dan helped us get them hung, we realized we needed to adjust the height to match the full height cabinets. Dean came over and after helping get the full height pantry and refrigerator cabinets assembled and in place, we got the other upper cabinets down and rehung. Dan returned and he and Sarah started assembling the base cabinets. Now that we’re up to this point, let me take a step back and fill you in on how we wound up with these cabinets. Our GC told us he had a great “Amish” cabinet maker that would make and insta ..read more
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Hardwood Flooring
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
Back when we started this project, we decided we wanted hardwood floors. The house had hardwood floors originally, but they were too far gone to save. For one, they didn’t go through the whole house, as areas like the kitchen had been torn up and replaced with plywood at some point. Next, we were changing the floorplan, so we couldn’t leave them in place. Perhaps most importantly, they were buried under layers of laminate floors, full of nails, and had been refinished so many times there wasn’t much left. We pulled the original floors up as part of demo and had a fun time trying to give them a ..read more
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Stair Cladding
Two Flat: Remade | The story of our whole-house renovation
by Matt
2y ago
I built the first floor stairs quite a while ago, back in August of 2014, actually. They’re a combination of LVL and OSB, and the intention has always been to skin or clad them in wood. We debated a bit whether to do all stained or white risers and skirts with stained steps, and we finally settled on the latter, since the underside of the stairs is drywalled, and the stairs up to the attic are also drywalled since they’ll have carpeting, plus they don’t stock red oak plywood locally. With the hardwood flooring going in, now’s a great time to get this project into gear. Framed Stairs (also hard ..read more
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