Office Flooring

We designed the office floor around two leftover pieces of oriented strand board (osb) from the construction. Sanded up and sealed with clear poly-whey floor finish the material looks amazing. More leftover material from a neighboring job site allowed us to add burnt poplar in between the osb giving us some extra width and more importantly a very unique look.

Each poplar piece is biscuited to the osb section, which is then screwed directly to the sub-floor with some nice looking 2.5″ screws. All materials were prepared at the workshop, making it much easier to cut, sand, drill, countersink and finish.

Upper Kitchen Cabinets

Installed the upper kitchen cabinets and lighting this weekend. We’d previously worked on the construction of the cabinet boxes at the workshop – maple plywood framing, edgebanded fronts and a full length top that runs across both boxes and secures the microwave in the middle.

The whole system hangs on a frame that’s bolted to the wall, allowing access to wiring for the lights, and the ability to easily remove the cabinets if we need to – which actually happened numerous times as we finalized the leveling and microwave attachment.

Lighting is provided by four inexpensive T8 30w commercial fluorescent fixtures, 4′ in length.

Frame system…

Lighting wiring pulls…

Fixtures being attached…

Let there be light!

First cabinet up, also wiring for microwave…

Second cabinet up…

Top and microwave in place…

And finally with some decoration…

Interior Painting

It’s been slow going, but the interior painting is now coming along nicely. Both bathrooms are done – 1 coat primer + 2 coats color – and look great. The kitchen is also finished and ready for the cabinet installs.

The rest of the house is in the priming stage, and I’m trying to put in a number of hours everyday. It’s wonderful to see it all coming together, piece by piece. Rae picked up 8 more gallons of our “off-white” today, as well as the accent wall colors, and I can’t wait to put those on this weekend.

We chose Pittsburgh Paint’s Pure Performance line which offers Zero VOC, low odor and Green Seal Class A Certification. Since we’re planning on some bold accent colors, starting with a Zero VOC base is essential because the tinting process adds VOCs, especially the darker colors.

So far the paint and primer has been excellent, with good coverage and very little odor. We’ve gone all day and not noticed any symptoms of being in close contact with the paint (headaches, nausea etc.) but we’re still getting plenty of fresh air flow through the open windows just in case.
The primer and two coats of final color did peel off around the shower however when we attempted to remove the masking tape without scoring first, showing that it hadn’t soaked in, but this was a heavily mudded part and not the drywall. Thinning the primer for these types of area may have prevented this, allowing it to soak through the plaster a bit more. A full days drying may have done wonders too, but we were impatient!

Here’s our color swatch:

And here’s the latest gallery of painting progress:

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