I had loaned Dave's favorite, variable speed drill to his brother earlier in the week (he was going to try to repair their own automatic garage door) so Dave and I tinkered around with the door casings and rosettes until Michael could drop the drill off to us in the afternoon.
We put the casing around the door to the garage and it looks so nice! The rosettes posed a bit of a problem since our walls are so textured. After using a square to position the rosettte at the corner of the door frame, you're supposed to nail and glue it to the corner. We kept having to scrap away the texture so it wouldn't move. After the garage door we did the sliding glass door frame.
Here's Dave working on the rosettes on the door to the garage:
Once the drill arrived, I anxiously watched Dave trying one last time to get that darn transition stuff to work. It turns out I had just misunderstood him last weekend when he said that it wouldn't work. What he meant to say was that the cheesy blue plastic rail wouldn't work because he drilled it down too close to the sliding glass door frame. This meant that there was no "wriggle room" to slide and snap the faux laminate transition on. So I watched as he had to drill a whole new set of holes (again, using all his weight and a brand new masonry bit).
The problem with our house is that it is crappy--it is a run-of-the-mill 1950s insta-track house made of, at best, medium quality materials. The concrete slab has stones in it, which are harder than the surrounding concrete. So your drill bit can wander away from vertical if you happen to hit one of those stones. He had to be very careful to keep those holes vertical so that the rail would end up exactly where he wanted it. I suggested that when he met resistance, that he remove the drill from the hole and hammer down there with a long nail. That seemed to help get past those stubborn parts.
What a handsome transition piece! Davie does such good work:
He was able to install the transition piece under the pocket doors to the kitchen linoleum without too much trouble and he only had to let the drill cool off a few times. (He has this weird method of testing how hot the tip is with his lips...).
Before doing the casing around the pocket doors, we started fiddling with the pretty new baseboard we bought. We cut a little piece and put it next to the door casing to see how it would look. Ick. The baseboard stuck out away from the wall past the casing material. It looked baaaaad. We flipped through our new book from Home Depot called "Trimwork 1-2-3" to see what we'd done wrong. The book showed people also installing plinth pieces, with are decorative wooden pieces that go at the bottom of the door frame and meet directly with the baseboard. The last thing we wanted to do was to go back to Home Depot for more stuff like that. After another 15 minutes of playing with the piece and experimenting with angled cuts, I decided that there HAD to be a logical solution to this. I mean, this baseboard and the casing we bought are sold in "professional packs" of like 120 linear feet. Contractors buy this stuff by the ton and trim out entire houses with it. It is MEANT to be used together (we're just adding the rosettes because we're a) lazy with mitering and b) they look pretty). I finally realized that we must have installed the casing backwards; it is angled width-wise and we positioned it so that the thickest part was closer to the door, not to the baseboard.
Simple as it sounds, it wasn't much fun: we removed all of the casing (being very careful not to upset those rosettes) and reinstalled it the other way around. It still looks so pretty! The baseboard installation went pretty smoothly, once we figured out how to use our new coping saw to cope one part of each corner. It is truly amazing what a difference that large baseboard does to that room. The walls are still peach but it looks so nice with the new flooring!
The new casing around the sliding glass door. It will be mostly covered since I usually have curtains here to keep out some of the southern sun:
Look at how crappy our door looks now (we'll either hang a new panel door or just paint this a crisp white and get new hardware):
We raised our dining room table with casters to make it easier to clean the floors:
I spent last night filling in all those nail holes with putty and I touched up the peach paint from where our hammer smacked pieces of tiles hit the walls. Hopefully I'll be able to get all the trim painted before my parents arrive this weekend. Then I get to put all the furniture back in (this is my favorite part--I LOVE arranging and rearranging furniture). I'm painting two little shelves a clean white to use in the dining room and am on the market for a used sideboard/buffet that I can also paint.
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