The Free Box - 6/29/08

I love the free box at my place of work. It's like a ghetto social experiment to see what people give away for free and what people take from the box. The most surprising part isn't what people take (almost everything); it's finding the items that so have so little value that no one wants them at all.

The last time I checked the free box - all the way back in March - it contained a Goldschlager hat, a bunch of women's deodorant, and a VHS tape of Mission: Impossible. And now?



The hat remains! In my experience, people will take anything from the free box, and yet, we've found an item with absolutely no commercial value. No one wants this hat.

Joining the hat (and soon to be taken, I'm sure) are a hardcover version of Howard Stern's Private Parts, a Sony Walkman, a half-used bag of coffee, and a coin bag that one would use if one worked at a business with a cash register. We have no cash register, nor do we work with any money at my job.

I considered taking two of these items. Fortunately, common sense quickly took over.

Home Project 7: New Kitchen Countertops Should be Easy, Right?

With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to replace our old - dare I say original to the house - white and green Formica countertops with something a little more... ummm... not out of a 70's sitcom. Here you can see the original countertops:

The original white with speckled green Formica, after the cabinets have been painted white.
When people talk countertops on home improvement shows (my favorite of which being Flip That House) the conversation usually starts with granite, with possible mentions of other materials like ceramic tile, engineered stone, or even concrete. In real life, our conversation didn't seriously get much past laminate, pretty much for cost reasons.

Our original plan was to go with the ready to install pre-fabricated laminate countertops that get screwed into the bottom cabinets, but do to a "quirk" in the house (and I use the nicest word possible), the top of our cabinets - to which the Formica was glued on top of - was simply a piece of plywood nailed into the sides of the cabinets. At that point, we could a) rip the plywood off the cabinets and likely destroy them in the process, or b) peel the Formica of the plywood and leave the cabinets intact. To make things easy on ourselves, we went with the second option.

Demo time. The old Formica was glued down pretty well, but ultimately, it was no match for hammers and a little elbow grease. After sanding and puttying up some holes, we were left with a blank canvas.

Going from pic 1 to pic 2, you may have noticed that we had already ripped off the laminate backsplash and painted the wall green.
So, instead of going with the pre-fabricated laminate counters, we switched gears and bought two 8-foot laminate sheets at Lowes, which looked something like this (although they weren't white).

Researching the topic, I was excited to find out that laminate sheets can be cut with special utility blades and a utility knife. Perfect! I didn’t any electric saws at the time, so that was a nice break.

However, I found out a valuable lesson after giving the utility knife thing a go. Unless you are Hercules, or a descendent from another deity, it is damn near impossible to cut laminate with a knife. After making a few weak scratches in the sheets, I gave up, measured everything out, brought them to my father-in-law’s house, and had him cut it all to size with his table saw. 10 minutes later, that was done.

The next step was to glue all of the cut sheets onto the plywood base with something that smelled like triple-strength airplane glue. It is potent. It also bonds on contact, so it's important not to screw it up. I'm a screw it up kind of home improvement guy, so this worried me a little, but with some clever use of dowels and a steady hand, we were able to get the sheets glued on almost straight.

Not my house, but this is what you can expect from the gluing process.



After the sheets have been glued and have dried
Next step was to cut a hole in the laminate for the sink, which was right in the middle of the countertop pictured above. Easy? With the right tools, probably. Instead, the best thing I could get my hands on was an old, rusty jigsaw. As this thing tore through the laminate, sending cracks for inches in every direction, all I could think about was ruining all of the hard work we put into this project so far. Fortunately all of the cracks stopped before they got to where the laminate met the plywood and I was able to get a clean hole for the sink.

Plumbing

While we were replacing the countertops, it seemed like a good time to install a new stainless steel sink and faucet. The sink was the same size as the original one (according to the dimensions on the box). As it turns out, it was ever so slightly bigger and required a little extra cutting and muscle to squeeze it into the space. And it was 8 inches deep instead of 7, giving us a little extra room to do the dishes. I was surprised how easy the sink went in and hooked back up to all the plumbing. Man, plumbers have it easy.


A new sink and facet (second attempt). I've spared you the plumber's shots of myself under the sink.

Oh wait, maybe plumbing isn't that easy. The sink started leaking and, surprsie, surprise, I had forgot to seal the strainer basket to the sink with plumber's putty. Attempt 2 to install the sink was more successful.

The Finish

Finishing the job went smoothly and was the most fun (i.e. only fun) part of the project, probably because I had the correct tool for the job. My parents had given me a router tool for Christmas and it was my first chance to use it. After running the router over the edges, the corners actually looked professionally done. Between the table saw, jig saw, and router, it was a good lesson on how much easier things can be done with the correct tools. Here is the finished countertops with the sink:


This was easily the most difficult home improvement project I'd done to date, but I was really impressed with the results. If you're looking for a how to on laminate countertops like this, the best one I found on the internet was this one from Ace Hardware.

Home Project 6: "New" Cabinets

With the kitchen beginning to enter the 21st century after a couple projects (see the first one and the second one), it was time to move on to updating the kitchen cabinets. Again, here is a picture of the kitchen after buying the house.



Those are fine cabinets, say, for a cabin in the woods or on the side of a mountain, but not so much for a modern kitchen. But, instead of spending thousands of dollars putting in all new custom cabinets (which would have no doubt looked great if we had the money) we went cheap and decided to see how they looked if we painted them white. The first step in the process was to detach all the doors and hardware. After giving them a sand and a putty (or was it the other way around), it was time to use the one home improvement skill I have: Painting.



Can't forget to paint the actual cabinets as well. Look at that happy painter...



Man that guy never smiles when he's doing house renovations. Using a bit of strategery on our part, we were able to paint the front of the cabinets without removing any dinnerware. Brilliant! And only a couple of plates ended up white.



After two coats of paint and some new handles and hinges from ACE hardware, and we've got some pretty decent looking white cabinets.



One note about the hardware. If you have the old school wrap around hinges like you see in the picture above, and a wife, it becomes vitally important to exactly match the color of the handles to the hinges. In that case, don't make the mistake I did and buy non-returnable aged pewter color handles before buying any hinges. As I quickly discovered, hinges generally come in three general colors: brass, nickel, and aged bronze. None of those come all that close to matching the color of aged pewter. After scouring the Internet and about 8 different hardware stores, I finally found one type of hinge that matched the color of the handles. Total time that we were without cabinet doors: 2 weeks.

Home Project 5: Why is it so Dark in the Kitchen?

With the kitchen painted, it was time to move on to the lighting in the room. As you can see in the "before," the entire kitchen was lit with a single 60-watt light bulb.



Yep, that was the only light in the kitchen. Look carefully at the back corner of the countertops and you'll see a severe lack of brightness, which made using sharp knifes a kind of interesting carnival game.

To add additional light to the kitchen and save or fingers from a horrificly painful accident in the future, we decided to add a set of four six-inch recess lights above the fridge, stove, and sink. To make the job easy, I'd recommend you do what I did and marry into a family with a couple of professional electricians. Alternatively, you can blackmail one. They did all the hard work, such as cutting holes in the ceiling, running the wire up in the attic, and installing the lights, while I deftly managed the broom.



It's harder than it looks, trust me.

After they carefully measured where the lights were going in the ceiling, they simply traced out a circle using the light casing and cut out a hole using a sawzall. The next step was to head up in the attic to run the wite and install the casings*. Finally, they installed a new dimmer switch and hooked it up to the new recess lights. With a couple of professionals, the lights went up about an hour and were simple to put in (which is easy for me to say). Four 60-watt light bulbs later and here is the finished product.



Total cost: Light casings and trim: $90, Wire: $10, Labor: free (suckers)

*Our house was built in 1972. At the time in this area, if you decided to go with electric heat for your house, the electric company would come in and blow a whole bunch of insalation in your attic for free (as I understand it, I could be wrong since I wasn't around in 1972). Anyway, our attic contains about 3 feet of 35-year old blown insalation that has combined with dust, dead bugs, and a host of other stuff that makes you want to dry heave. My brother-in-laws were none to happy to have to crawl through that to install the lights and they won't let me forget it.