New Office Floor - Day 2 & 3

Took K a couple more days to get the laminate flooring installed in her office.  Of course, she had to hurry up, so she could get her desk and stuff back in there and get back to work! 

Here's the finished floor.  Not bad for FREE! 

New Office Floor - Day 1

Last week, K found a great deal on Craigslist.  She often looks through the listings of free items to see if there are building materials she might want. 

The big score last week was approximately 450 square feet of laminate bamboo-look flooring.  Which had retailed for more than $1000 and had only been used for 3 years.  In a yoga studio.
Which means it was cleaned gently and often.  Shoes were not worn on it, pretty much ever.  And it included an expensive and cushy underlayment.

The flooring was free if you came in and UN-installed it for the building owner.  Which K did, and about 3 hours later we had a big pile of flooring under our kitchen table (including 2 unopened boxes that were in storage.)

Kristy removed some of the linoleum tiles that were loose, then installed the underlayer and started with the lengths of laminate.

Leftover tiles and cement with glue

Mallet-ing, mallet-ing...

Eventually, K had to call it a night.  Finishing the floor and adding the floor trim will have to wait for tomorrow.

Side note: Friday night was K's birthday party, and our friend was in our kitchen and said, "Where did you get that flooring...?"  Turned out it was from the studio she had worked at for years!  She had cleaned that floor probably a hundred times!  Hilarious!  What a small city...

Chandeliers and Switch Plates

While having a lazy, laying-in-bed morning today, K and I discussed some of the decorating we plan to do in our bedroom, and I asked her if she could please put up the chandelier today.  It's been sitting in the storage room for a few months, finished.  And she said yes, she would put it up for us!  :-)

Here's the before:

That base is kind of cool-- I wonder what the glass looked like....

We got the chandelier up, with one quick $6 trip to the Home Depot to get the needed hardware that was slightly different than what was there from the old fixture.

Once all the bulbs were lit up, it was like, "Holy crap, we have to get a dimmer on this thing!"  With all those bulbs in a normal-sized bedroom, it was a LOT of light.  So K ran to her supply of goodies and grabbed a dimmer switch, and installed it.  I makes a huge difference!

Finished and lit up!  Except for the one bulb on the left that likes to go on and off...

The previous light fixture had a bigger base, as you can see around the medallion of the chandelier.  This will get fixed later!

And then that led into K working on our messed-up light switch situation.  The house has switches that don't do anything, lots of missing switch plates and a couple weirdly-placed outlets.  She fixed 2 broken switches, and figured out that our hall light is wired to a box that, until now, had an outlet in it.  In the middle of the wall!  So, now we've got a switch there and we are able to turn the hall light on and off without pulling a string attached to the fixture/ base holding a bare bulb.

K also put in a new switch at the bottom of the stairs leading to my office.  Until now, there has only been a foam insulator as a switch plate, with a normal up/down switch.  It seems really out of place there, on an inside wall.  Like, I could see putting one of those on an outside wall, if you really wanted to be picky about insulating every inch.  But this piece had obviously been painted over at least once, and it was just weird.

Foam insulator "switch plate"

Last week at the thrift store, K had found the coolest, strange, old switch for 25 cents!  It's the push button kind, and it's really just a clear lucite plate and you can put whatever kind of paper or fabric that you want underneath.

Whoever had owned it put a cool patterned, blue paper under the plate.  It looked kind of old, maybe even 50s, I'm not sure.  But the paper was double-sided and on the back was...  a crazy clown!!  The paper was perfectly centered so that if the clown was facing the front of the switch, the push-button would actually be his nose!  I flipped out and I had to have it!

Pretty, patterned paper

Clown face on the other side of the paper!
The brass button makes the perfect nose for him.

And while installing this switch, we found more pink paint had been on the walls of the stairway at some point.  A coral rose color pink, more vivid than the pink in the basement.

Here is how the thrift store switch turned out!  I love it!  Obviously, our walls still need some love, but we'll get to that at some point.

For now, I'm just excited that this button makes it easier to turn the lights on and off.  I'm usually going up the stairs carrying my breakfast or armloads of other stuff, and it's much easier to hit this switch with my hands full.

Boy kitty climbed the ladder to sniff the chandelier, then had to figure out how to get down!