Studio711.com – Ben Martens

When we bought our house, the master bathroom had carpeting and no door. Odd, yes. There is a separate toilet room at the end of the bathroom and that part did have a door, but it’s still a bit weird to have someone watch you in the shower.

When we got our new carpet, I had them skip this room because we weren’t fans of carpet near the showers and tubs. Last weekend, I finally got around to installing a vinyl floor so we can use the bathroom.

One of my top priorities was going cheap on this project. We’re planning to gut the bathroom in a year or two and get rid of the ugly stuff in there now. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a floor that I knew would be going away, and I didn’t want to put anything fancy in because it probably would need to be modified. I had originally intended to find a remnant, but by ordering a new piece we got exactly what we wanted for a design and I was also able to get it in the newer “floating vinyl” style.

This floating vinyl has a pad on the back of it which keeps it from warping at the edges. It also provides a bit of a cushion as you walk on it. The big benefit is that you don’t have to cover your floor with adhesive which is hard to take up later. Instead, you cut the vinyl to fit and then place a few strips of double sided tape down to hold it in place. It’s meant to float around a bit as the floor expands and contracts.

This is the first time I can remember installing vinyl so I’m sure I made a lot of mistakes, but I’m happy to report that it’s at least functional. I’m not happy with the line along the tub and the shower. I had to fill that with caulk to keep water from getting underneath, but it’s a pretty thick line of white against the brown vinyl and yellow tub. Bleh. It remains to be seen whether I will live with that until we tear it out, or if I’ll try to come up with something better.

Next up: adding a door.

Our house came with a long list of appliances that needed to be replaced. Chelsea’s Dad, Brent, has a heating and cooling company (PMG Mechanical 206-624-5040) so I called him out to take a look at our water heater and furnace. His opinion about the water heater lined up with our inspector and a plumber that had been at the house: replace it soon. The furnace? That’s next year. Yeehaw.

Instead of just replacing the 50 gallon water heater with something similar, we went fancy and got a Takagi TK-3 tankless water heater. Tankless? Yep. That box hanging on the wall in the photo is our water heater. When you turn on a hot water faucet somewhere in the house, the burner fires up and it heats up the water as fast as it flows through the box. In theory you have to wait a tiny bit longer for your hot water, but since many of our faucets are on the other side of the house, I can’t tell any difference. The benefits are that you never run out of hot water and you aren’t paying to keep a bunch of water hot all day when you’re not using it.

Brent said that the water heater he took out was around 61% efficiency. For every $1 we spent on gas to heat the water, $0.39 was thrown away. The new system is 82% efficient and qualifies for some pretty large rebates and tax credits for being Energy Star certified.

You may notice that there is a recirculation pump in there. It’s the cheesy kind that works with a bypass value which forms a loop at the end of your plumbing run so your hot and cold pipes fill with hot water. This was on the old tank when we bought the house so I had him hook it up but it’s not enabled right now. Running a pump like this means that you’re burning gas the entire time and I’d rather just run the cold water out of the pipes myself in the morning. Also, when he set this up he added a hose bib for both the hot and cold water lines, so in theory, I could easily have hot water to wash my car!

All in all, I have no complaints with the system. I won’t really know if this saves us any money because we haven’t gotten enough gas bills to see a trend change. Brent said that for many people, the bill actually goes up because they never run out of hot water and use more of it. I’m not sure that Tyla and I will fit into that category since we aren’t in the habit of running out of hot water, but we’ll see. Hopefully this keeps our water warm for many years to come!

Before we moved in (and a little after moving in) we did a lot of painting. The living room, kitchen, family room, upstairs hallway, master bedroom, and master bedroom closet were all touched by the mad fury of paintbrushes and rollers. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

Some of these things might be obvious for those of you who paint a lot, but here are some things I learned that I figure I should remember for next time:

• The computers at Home Depot do a great job of matching colors if you have the codes available. When you decide on a color, have them print off an extra code sticker and keep it safe so you can buy it again later.
• The little $2 sample jars are great for touching up when you’re done.
• The green Frog Tape is more expensive than the blue stuff, but it works amazingly well. I was unsure when we initially picked up our supplies, but after taking the tape off the first room, I was a believer.
• If the four phases of painting are washing, taping, trimming and rolling, the distribution of work is about 20%, 35%, 35%, 10%. No matter how often I paint, I always seem to forget that the rolling is actually the quick part and by the time you get there, you’re almost done.
• Unless you’re painting a small room, you can’t have too much help. Painting scales very well. If you have four people, you’ll get it done almost exactly twice as fast as if you did it yourself. It was amazing how long it took us to do little paint jobs after everyone left.
• Radiused corners might look night but they are a pain to paint especially when you’re trying to stop a color at that corner.

Do you want to paint your house like ours? Here are the colors we used. White is the trim, gobi dessert is the “boring beige” on most of our walls, and shy violet is the color of the laundry room. I’m sure we’ll add more colors as time goes on, but it’s nice to have a small set of colors. The previous owners used a very slightly different shade in every room and left us ~40 cans of poorly marked paint in the garage.

Last weekend we spent a lot more time at the house getting it prepped. We owe another huge thanks to Don, Nancy, Logan, Megan, Andy and Stephanie for coming over. We’ve gotten so much more done than I thought would ever be possible! The projects for this weekend were painting a weird bar in the master bedroom white, painting the hallway (vaulted ceilings), and cleaning out the pantry and painting it. We were home before dinner on both days which is a testament to how much help we had. The house is really looking great!

There are eight new photos available under the House tag. In the photo of Don in the kitchen you can spot our brand new fridge. That was delivered earlier in the week along with a washer and dryer.

We spent a lot of time painting this weekend, and before we got started, I knew I was going to need some ladders. I figured I would need a step ladder and an extension ladder, but being the geek I am, I found one ladder that does both. It’s available from a lot of places, but one of the cheapest is Amazon and you can get it with 2 day shipping if you have Amazon Prime!

It turned out to be even more useful than I thought it would be. You can use it as a regular step ladder but you can set it at different heights between 5’ and 9’. As an extension ladder, it will go all the way out to 22’. And as an unexpected (and probably not recommended) bonus, when you get close to a corner, you can decrease the height of one side of the stepladder to bring you closer to the corner. The same idea applies if you want to set up the ladder on the stairs.

The biggest drawback is the weight. It’s a heavy ladder, but given it’s flexibility and price, I’m very happy that I bought it.

Plus, you get to have this video run through your head the whole time you’re using it. (No, the ladder in the video isn’t the one I bought and the one I bought doesn’t support this configuration.)