danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

ORLANDO – Orlando is the worst place to drive. And the day after Thanksgiving is the worst day to go shopping. So what did I do this year? Went shopping in Orlando the day after Thanksgiving. Actually, it was for a very good cause. Our close friends Kat and Harris were married in a lovely ceremony only a week before (more on that later), and we wanted to give them a worthy gift.

Now, as you may recall, earlier this year I built Mrs. Hill a whole new kitchen, and when it was finished I wished she might have some quality cookware to enjoy. So, on a trip to Charlotte over the summer we paid a visit to the Le Creuset store in, of all places, Yemassee, South Carolina. Le Creuset is a French company that makes enameled cast iron cookware. I saw an episode of How It’s Made once where they showed the production of a Le Creuset Dutch oven, and it was amazing. And somehow, in spite of my relative lack of enthusiasm for cuisine, I had actually heard of the brand. I somehow knew that Le Creuset was known for lasting a long time. A lifetime, really. So it didn’t take much to convince me that this was something I wanted Miriam to have. I just didn’t expect to personally get as much use out of it. I now cook almost exclusively with one of the pieces we brought home that day, and it is marvelous. I say all this to make the next part of the story more clear.

Whether it was from our testimonials or not, our close friend Kat expressed a wish for a nice new Dutch oven, especially since one she owned previously, but made by another company, had been recalled by the manufacturer for a potentially dangerous defect. Miriam took a mental note of this, and on the day after Thanksgiving, six days after Kat’s wedding, Mrs. Hill and I found ourselves on our way to the Le Creuset store in Orlando. The problem for us was that everyone else in the country apparently had the same idea. I cannot possibly convey the enormity of the traffic. We moved inches at a time. Pedestrians on the sidewalk appeared to move away from us so quickly that I think I noticed a red shift. When we at last reached the entrance of the shopping mall, we found the police had barricaded the street; no one was getting through. Imagine the busiest football game day in the history of Gainesville, where cars park anywhere they can make room, where pedestrians cross the street where ever they feel like it, and where police tape restricts access to the very places you wish to go. Imagine that, and then imagine much worse. Miriam had to jump out of the car at an intersection and proceed on foot to the store while I tried my best not to get smashed by the insane drivers determined to reach their goal if it killed them. Cars covered the median and shoulder of the road, and people openly defied no parking signs to secure a small bit of real estate. Miriam emerged from the nightmare unscathed, and with a beautiful turquoise blue Dutch oven she was sure Kat would love. I was shaken. “I am never coming here again”, I vowed. I think I even shook my fist.

We proceeded on to Miriam’s parents’ house, and the next day, as we were enjoying an afternoon at Walt Disney World, Miriam received a textual message from Kat, who was on her way home from Richmond, where her wedding had taken place. “I just got a turquoise Le Creuset Dutch oven at a store in North Carolina”, it read. I died a little, but it was actually kind of funny. Miriam is such a good gift giver that she knew exactly what the bride would have purchased herself given the chance. And she did.

So, it’s back to the nightmare for us to exchange a Dutch oven for a skillet. It’s a good thing Kat and Harris are such wonderful people.

Filed under: Food, Friends, House, Transportation on November 27th, 2011 | No Comments »

When our house was new it had modest cabinetry, including a hutch that sat in the southeast corner. At some point in the past (I would guess the 1970s) that cabinet was eliminated, and new cabinets were installed along the south wall to the left of the door. The upper cabinets were tall, with four doors – two big, two small. By the time we bought the house, the two small doors were gone, making for what appeared to be high shelves above cabinet doors.  Below was a base cabinet with about four linear feet of counter top. It had one large door, behind which we kept pots and pans, and one false door that allowed it to have four drawers at one end. When Miriam designed her dream kitchen, this whole cabinet and counter would cease to be, much as the old corner cabinet ceased to be.

The rest of the cabinets, along the west wall, boasted precious little counter space. Indeed, between the twenty-four inches of counter top to the lest of the sink, the six inches between the sink and the stove, and the sixteen or so inches to the right of the stove, there wasn’t much room to prepare food. The chief obstacle to creating more counter space was a hallway opening to the right of the stove. We had ceased to use this hallway, since the bedrooms and bathroom are accessible through the living room. And, curiously, there was no hallway there when the house was constructed. A refrigerator would have gone there, and on the other side of the wall behind the fridge would have been a furnace. Earlier this year I closed in that hallway, making a closet on one side, and wall space on the other where I could install new kitchen cabinets, and dramatically increase counter space.

The first step in installing new cabinets is to remove the old ones, and that was, as you might imagine, an ugly business. I am not the sort of fellow you see on HGTV taking a sledgehammer to old cabinets. That’s rookie crap. It is much better to disassemble what you can whole, and carry out large pieces than it is to break everything to bits. What made my job ugly was that there was a good deal of rot in the old base cabinets near the sink. The particleboard components were disintegrating, and there was a good deal of nastiness to be found under and behind things. The upper cabinets were, somewhat surprisingly, assembled in one long, heavy piece. I removed the screws that held it on the wall, and down it came with a great bang. It took two people to carry it from the house. The removal of the old cabinets left me with a room that looked like one of the houses in Whoville after the Grinch stole everything but a few pieces of wire.

Once the old cabinets were out I set to work on installing the new flooring and hanging wallpaper – both of which I have already described here. Then I could begin to install the new cabinets.

What cabinets to buy? That was the question. Miriam had long considered cabinets from Ikea. They come in a variety of styles (with Ikea, and other manufacturers, too, the cabinets themselves are all the same; the door determines the style), and are highly configurable. Plus, they have a clever hanging system that seems like it would greatly ease installation versus the traditional method. Also, they are very affordable. Miriam and I must have looked at Ikea kitchens a million times, and she spent–no exaggeration–years looking through Ikea catalogs trying to find the style that best suited her. Over the years her preferences switched from a dark wood grain finish to all-white. Still, I could tell that she wanted something more.

We had, of course, browsed all the kitchens at the big box home improvement centers. Some of them were quite nice, but tremendously expensive. Many were far too fancy and/or ostentatious. Miriam wanted something simple but elegant.

One day she saw a new line of cabinetry at Home Depot that perfectly matched her style and offered a level of utility that far exceeded anything we were used to, and matched what one can find at Ikea. We made an appointment with the cabinet guy–a friendly fellow named Eric–and he walked us through the whole design process. (From beginning to end, we must have spoken to Eric about a hundred times. Little things come up here and there, and it was great that he turned out to be so nice and helpful.) Miriam selected cabinets in a color I call gray, she calls “taupe”, whatever that is, and the manufacturer calls “Ocean Floor”. It is pleasant, and it looks splendid with the wallpaper.

During the design process we selected the various cabinet and door styles that suited our taste and needs. Some of what we were doing was limited by our room layout. That is, the location of the doors and window affected where we could put things. In some cases I was able to move things to work better for us. The stove, for instance, I moved over a couple feet to give us usable counter space next to the sink. The cabinets are not totally custom. That is, they come in certain standard sizes. For us, this meant that when all was said and done, there would be a couple inches on either end of the room that would need to be filled. Conveniently, the manufacturer provided blank pieces of wood in our “Ocean Floor” color, which I could rip to the proper width and install.

Our total order consisted of a tall pantry to go to the right of the refrigerator; a deep cabinet to go directly above the refrigerator; four tall upper cabinets, one of which has glass doors; one short upper cabinet to go above the stove; one wide lower cabinet with three drawers; one wide cabinet with one drawer and two doors; one sink base that has two short doors and a blank area that designed to be cut away to accommodate an apron sink; various filler pieces and whatnot. I don’t remember how much it cost. Thousands, probably.

Miriam bought this kitchen for the looks and functionality. I was more concerned with the quality and made-in-USAness. When we finally placed the order, after a long process involving computer programs and repeated measuring on my part, the order was sent off to a factory somewhere in the Carolinas. Several weeks later, while we were at Disney World a totally not prepared, I got a phone call saying, “we’re bringing your kitchen tomorrow”. When the truck arrived the next day, the two guys unloaded what seemed like a million enormous boxes and wheeled them into the house. Whereas Ikea cabinets come with some assembly required, these cabinets came ready-to-hang, with all the hardware and doors installed. That saves time, but it also meant that I had to make room to put a whole kitchen’s worth of cabinets somewhere other than the kitchen, which, at the time, still had the old, asbestos-tainted floor awaiting removal. I spent at least six hours unpacking the boxes and inspecting the cabinets and doors. In the entire order, only one item was damaged, and a quick phone call to Eric resulted in the arrival of a new, perfect glass door within a week or so.

While I was dealing with the floor tiling and wallpaper hanging, the cabinets just sat still, blocking access to important things like compact discs and computer printers. But when the floor was finally down and grouted, I began moving the cabinets into the kitchen. They were heavy.

It seemed logical to install the upper cabinets first while I had plenty of room to work below. Unlike Ikea cabinets, with their clever metal cleat, these cabinets get screwed into the studs from within, using three-inch cabinet screws with a wide head and a square drive. But you have to keep them in place somehow while you drive the screws in. The best way to deal with this is to install a temporary shelf to support the weight of the cabinets while you secure them to the studs. I just used a 2′x4′ stud. I got some help lifting from my friend Kyle.

One problem was that studs weren’t always where I needed them to be, especially at either end of the run of cabinets. This is because the edges of the end cabinets fell three inches from the end of the wall, and, therefore, missed the studs by about three inches. To ensure the cabinets were properly supported, I opened up the walls on either end of the room and installed extra studs. That worked fine.

Before the cabinets were tightened down to the wall, I screwed the face frames together to ensure a tight fit with no gaps. A counter-sink bit ensured that the screw heads were flush with the cabinet frames.

Installing the base cabinets was mostly easier, if only because they support their own weight. The only real challenge was ensuring that everything was level. I screwed the face frames together as I did with the upper cabinets.

The one exception to the above rule was the base cabinet for the sink. Miriam had selected an apron sink, sometimes called a farm sink. These look cool, but require a huge amount of work. Obviously, for the apron sink, a panel had to be cut out of the front of the cabinet. This was an intimidating prospect for me. I had to use a circular saw and make several plunge cuts. But I made myself a jig and it all worked out. The sink base also, of course, needed to have holes cut in the back for the drain pipe and the water supply pipes. To make the holes line up precisely, I crafted a jig. This was especially important in this instance because the drain pipe comes out of the wall at an angle. I couldn’t just push the cabinet back up to the pipes and mark where they touched, because if I did, everything would be off about an inch. But I got it just right, and was very happy with the results.

The pantry and cabinet surrounding the refrigerator were also challenging to install. They had to be positioned just so, and getting the face frames all tight and flush was tough. But once in the fridge fit perfectly.

Next: countertops and island.

Filed under: House on July 21st, 2011 | No Comments »

First and foremost: Miriam was right and I was wrong. I doubted that the old vinyl floor in our kitchen was contaminated with asbestos. Miriam, on the other hand, was certain. I guess I didn’t think we would be that unlucky, but she showed me websites with pictures of vinyl floors that looked suspiciously like ours, and argued passionately that we should have the old floor checked before we just went ripping it out. So we put a small chunk of the flooring into a plastic bag, put that plastic bag into another plastic bag, and FedExed that to a lab in Orlando. A day later we learned that the floor did, indeed, have a substantial quantity of asbestos. So, again, for the record, I was wrong.

The floor that was tainted was not the top layer of vinyl. Rather, it was a layer or two below the black and white checkerboard tiles that the previous owners installed – a green-yellow swirl that must have matched the old countertop perfectly. Conventional wisdom holds that asbestos should be removed by qualified professionals, so I began making phone calls. Nobody in Gainesville deals with asbestos, I learned. But a firm in Jacksonville was professional and prompt, and soon enough a white van driven by two men with haz-mat suits pulled into the driveway.

Once in the house they went to work sealing off the kitchen from the adjacent rooms using thick sheets of plastic, and ran an air pump with a special filter attached to a length of hose. From outside I could hear loud banging noises. Then, after about an hour the men emerged, declared the kitchen all clear, and loaded heavy bags of tainted flooring into the back of their van. They had taken away the asbestos floor, the non-suspect floor that was on top of it, and the rotten wood that was underneath it all. Years of leaking sinks or dishwashers had done some damage. I was glad to not have to mess with all of that myself, but it would be one of only two jobs handled by professionals during this whole project (the other would be installation of the countertops).

The asbestos guys left me with a bare concrete floor coated with a layer of old black adhesive. I could certainly have applied the new porcelain tile directly atop the concrete, but that would have left me with a finished floor a half-inch below the level of the parquet in the living room. I didn’t want that. So I purchased nine or so sheets of a cement backerboard called WonderBoard, or something like it. The “wonder” of it is that anyone can pick it up, since a sheet weighs a ton, and the edges are rough and painful. I couldn’t fit these panels into our car. It was a big hassle. The boards were adhered to the concrete foundation with plain old mortar like you’d use with tile. It took hours of grueling work to set all the sheets in place, tape the seams, and seal the joints.

A few days later I set to work on the tile. We chose twelve-inch-square porcelain tiles in a fairly neutral shade, but one which perfectly matched the wallpaper, and looked good with the yet-to-be-installed cabinetry. Miriam selected a fairly narrow width between tiles, and I had spacers to keep the tiles properly situated. I installed all the whole tiles one night, then went back the next day to set the cut pieces. I don’t remember how many cut pieces there were, but it was a lot. Something like fifty. The tile saw I had purchased from someone off Craigslist worked, but was slow as could be. I was outside one night until after dark cutting. But the cut pieces installed just the same as the whole pieces, and I felt relieved to have the whole thing ready for grout.

Grouting a floor is a miserable chore. It isn’t that it is mentally taxing. Nor is it even terribly detail-oriented like, say, trim carpentry or complez tilework. Rather, it’s fatiguing. It requires a decent amount of pressure with a rubber float to get the grout in all the joints. But that’s just the beginning. Once that’s done you still have to wipe it all down with a sponge several times. That’s where I became exhausted, and several times just rolled over and laid flat on my back in the middle of a wet, sandy floor. But after a couple passes with a sponge the tiles looked spiffy, and the whole room looked new.

The next step was installing cabinetry.

Filed under: House on June 16th, 2011 | No Comments »

Every home remodeling exercise experiences a glitch of some sort. If anyone—in an older house, at least—has ever decided to, say, re-do their kitchen, and then proceeded smoothly from start to finish without a setback, I’d like to hear about it. We have changed many things since buying this house six years ago. I’ve painted the exterior twice, repainted every interior room, hung wallpaper, applied wainscoting, installed crown molding, manufactured built-ins, replaced baseboards, hung new doors, installed new flooring in three rooms, replaced a sink and a toilet, run all new coax, and built two closets from scratch. But the kitchen project now underway represents, perhaps, the zenith of all our home remodeling projects, and it almost just turned into a fiasco.

Wallpaper is lovely. That is, I have a great appreciation for beautiful wallpaper designs, and always enjoy seeing rooms in which pretty wallpaper has been skillfully applied. A couple years ago, for example, I hung some beautiful wallpaper in the dining room. But hanging wallpaper is a drag. This isn’t because wallpaper is in-and-of-itself difficult to work with, but because every room has its own imperfections that make the job harder. There are minor obstacles, like electrical switches and outlets, windows and doors, and assorted wall fixtures. And there are major hurdles, like odd corners and angles. Sometimes you find several obstacles in one drop. Imagine, for instance, a situation in which you must work around a soffit with three angles, a corner with two, an electrical outlet, and door trim. Corners, which seem so simple in everyday life, present one of the biggest challenges. If they are even slightly out of plumb (and they almost always are), great care must be taken to navigate the corner. A terrible multiplying effect makes one incorrectly navigated corner a huge problem down the road. These are all known dangers. There are unknown dangers, too, and I just encountered the mother of them all.

First, I know one is not supposed to buy all the wallpaper for a project in one shot. This is because slight variations in color from one batch to the next may be visible when installed. This was something I had considered when we bought two extra rolls of paper to go along with another two we had purchased a couple years ago. The original plan had called for this particular grey and blue floral pattern to be hung in the bathroom, whenever that project came around. But Miriam’s affection for the design grew and grew, and eventually she decided she’d like to have it in her new kitchen. Thus, two more rolls were ordered. When they arrived I held the rolls side by side and found the colors to be identical, and felt no discomfort at our violation of a sacred rule of wallpaper.

Back in March, I began hanging wallpaper in the kitchen, which we had already emptied of all cabinets and appliances. That in and of itself was a huge job, but it got done with minimal calamity. I had four rolls of grey and blue Orla Kiely wallpaper sitting on a table in front of me. I selected one and went to work. I began at the southeast corner of the kitchen because that is the corner one sees first when entering the room. I hung the paper on the left side of the corner, then made another drop on the right side, and made a perfect match of the corner, staying plumb on both sides. I considered it a sort of miracle. I proceeded to do the south wall first, primarily because it presented the biggest challenge, and I wanted to get it out of the way. I’d have to go around a door, and cut away around several outlets, and an odd soffit or bulkhead on the west wall above where the cabinets will go. After I finished the south wall, I went back to the east wall, and continued moving to my left from the first drop I made at the corner. I worked around a window with no particular difficulty, and was making fine progress by the time I reached the end of my second roll.

I ripped the celophane of the third roll of paper, and held it up to the wall to make a dry fit with my previous drop. Something wasn’t right. The color was fine – identical, really. But the pattern was off. It looked identical. That is, it was definately the same gray and blue hydrangia floral pattern. But I could distincltly see the blue of the flower along the edge of this third roll, while on the first two, the blue of the bud didn’t reach the edge of the paper. At first I thought, okay, this is unfortunate, but I can overlap slightly, and it will still work. But then I noticed something much, much more serious. Even if I were to try and overlap, the grey leaves and blue flowers in the third and fourth rolls simply didn’t match up to the grey leaves and blue flowers of the first and second rolls. I held my tape measure up and saw to my horror that the repeats were completely different. The repeat on the first two rolls I hung (which, remember, were already glued to the wall) was twenty-five inches. The repeat on the third and fourth rolls was thirty inches. Disaster. It wasn’t that the thirty-inch pattern had an extra set of leaves between the buds so that, if I had to I could creatively cut and make it work; everything was just slightly larger, meaning no matter what I might try, it would never match up. Ever.

I stood there for a while to consider my options. I thought I recalled Miriam telling me something about this wallpaper no longer being available.  And, in any event, it was expensive paper. Tracking down and buying two more rolls would still likely require pulling down what I had already hung, which would be a huge waste. Then I figured it out.

As I said, I started at the southeast corner, worked west along the south wall, before returning to the corner and working north up the east wall. This was not entirely chance, since I had my reasons, but it was a great bit of luck for me, because the exact place I ran out of the twenty-five- inch pattern coincided exactly with where the refigerator and pantry will go when installed. I could transition from the twenty-five-inch pattern to the thirty-inch pattern at a spot that will be permanently hidden behind cabinetry. That is what I did.

I hung the first drop of thirty-inch pattern, which did not match the twenty-five-inch pattern at all. I made it to the end of the east wall, made the turn to the north wall, cut around the door and the electrical box, and got all the way to the west wall with only a couple feet of paper left to spare. I had not had an inch of the twenty-five-inch pattern left to spare when I made the transition. It occured to me that had I not started where I did in the southeast corner, and had I not done the south wall first, I would not have been able to make it work. Had I, for instance, begun with the east wall, by the time I realized the papers didn’t match, I’d have been stranded in the middle of an exposed wall with no way to hide the incongruity. The cleverest bit of deception I attempted to employ in this fiasco involved the position of the flower buds. As I said, the thirty-inch pattern simply does not match the twenty-five-inch pattern side-by-side. But since the patterns will never be seen next to one another, I got lucky. I just picked a place where I wanted to make the bunches of blue flowers appear to line up. I found that with the first two rolls I hung, the blue flowers fall about four inches from the ceiling. So I made sure that when I made my tansition to the thirty-inch repeat I had blue flowers fall about four inches from the ceiling. The eye is less likely to notice that the flowers forty inches down from the ceiling don’t match with what’s on the opposite wall, but the line near the ceiling is more noticable.

So, an epic disaster was narrowly avoided. In future posts I will tell you how I installed cabinets, wainscoting, various trim.

Filed under: House on May 24th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

The back two rooms in my home were added long after the rest of the house was built.  Directly off the kitchen is a room that was likely meant to be a utility room, but which we use as a dining/laundry room.  Though it was a bit rough when we moved in, it’s delightful now.  Off that room is another that was surely intended as an office (or Rock Room, as was the case with Josh Ney, from whom we bought the place).  It, too, was a tad dingy when we moved in, but I fixed it up a few years ago, and it is a fine room today in nearly every respect, but it was lacking a certain something: a closet.  Without a closet, a space cannot be called a bedroom, and Miriam really did deserve to have a better place to hang her clothes.  So, on my spring break I set out to build her a closet.

Building in a finished room is a much bigger challenge than building in a room with exposed studs and ceiling joists.  For one thing, you cannot build a wall flat on the ground and tilt it up.  The framing for my closet had to be installed piece by piece.

The first step in the process, of course, was determining how large the closet would be.  That decision was mostly made for me, because of the placement of a door and window, and an electrical switch and socket.  Unless I was willing to move those things, the closet was going to be about forty-eight inches wide, and thirty inches deep.  (A closet can be made as wide as you like, but if you intend to hang clothes inside, don’t make it less than twenty-seven inches deep.)

Once I had decided on the dimensions, I had to cut some 2x4s to make the top and bottom plates into which I could secure the vertical studs.  Since the ceiling had drywall on it already, installation of the top plates was tricky.  In one direction I could screw directly into the ceiling joists.  In the other direction I used large toggle bolts.  Those toggle bolts required a fairly large hole in the wood, and I used fender washers to ensure that the bolt didn’t just pull through the wood.  To make sure the top plate and bottom plate were in perfect alignment (because the walls could not be plumb otherwise), I used a plumb bob, and marked the location for my bottom plate.  The finished floor is parquet, and below that is concrete.  There are a number of ways to attach walls to concrete floors.  I used Liquid Nails and cut masonry nails.  Those incredibly strong nails can drive straight into concrete.  Of course, the top plates for each of the two walls I built (since I built the closet in a corner, I used two existing walls for the back and right side of the closet) went the entire width of the walls, but the bottom plate on the door wall needed much less lumber, since the door opening was over thirty-six inches.

Once the top and bottom plates were in place, I could begin erecting the studs.  That was straight-forward.  The ceiling in that room has a shallow pitch equal to the pitch of the roof at that part of the house, so I had to cut each stud carefully.  Since I couldn’t build the wall laying flat on the floor, nails were not a practical choice.  I selected a specialty screw called Spax that I found in the decking section.  It has a special Torx drive that held the screw on the bit while driving it, and it is almost impossible to strip.  I screwed all the studs into the plates with those Spax screws.  Where my new walls intersected existing walls, I either screwed the studs into existing studs behind the drywall, or used toggle bolts again.

Framing for the door gets a bit technical.  I bought a thirty-six inch door.  The doors actual dimensions are somewhat smaller, and the finished opening needs to be just slightly larger.  So, I had to carefully account for the extra space that the trim would take up, and that meant that the studs I erected needed to be thirty-seven and a half inches apart.  I made a similar calculation for the height of the header.  Incidentally, since these walls aren’t really bearing any of the weight of the roof, I didn’t worry about building a double top header on edge.  I did install cripples above the header, though.

With the framing done, I carefully measured the dimensions of my walls, and cut the drywall to fit.  Cutting drywall is messy, but not terribly difficult, particularly if you have a long straight edge.  It screws into the studs easily with a power drill.  I made the joints as tight as I could, especially at the one outside corner.  It’s not possible to get that perfect, which is why they sell a corner strip that covers the joint, and gets covered in compound.  Applying joint compound is exponentially easier than using traditional plaster.  It stays moist and pliable for hours.  That’s good and bad.  Good because it allows you to correct any mistakes, bad because waiting overnight for it to dry slows down progress.

With the walls up and the joints taped and plastered, I began my trim work.  Trim carpenters are the best carpenters.  The work they do is highly visible, so it must be precise.  Of course, one is almost never lucky enough to be working in areas that are perfectly square, and there are always small obstacles along the way, and those make trim carpentry harder.  In this case, I was lucky to be dealing with relatively simple cuts and angles.  I had removed the baseboards in that corner of the room before I began erecting the walls, so I had some material I could trim a little and put right back where it was.  On the right front side of the closet, though, I had cut the existing baseboard in place, without removing it.  I cut it in such a way that I would be able to but another piece of baseboard against it at a ninety-degree angle, and my calculations were perfect.  But to put the new shoe mould in, I couldn’t just miter it like all the other pieces.  I’d have to cope it.  I did, and it fit perfectly.

Trimming a door is always a pain, because everything has to be perfect or the door will either not function, or will, at least, look bad.  I took very careful measurements, cut my pieces, and dry fit them in place.  I only needed to shim the jamb in one small place, so that pleased me.  Shims are the most useful, cheapest thing in the world.  The casing was straightforward.  I used a simpler casing on the inside of the closet (where nobody will ever see it) than I did on the outside.  I set all my nails, filled the holes, and caulked the edges of the baseboards and door casing.  I painted the walls and trim to match the existing colors.

The last component was, perhaps, the most important: a rod system for hanging clothes.  We had browsed the various modular systems, such as Closetmaid, but were not impressed.  While they are highly configurable, they can get expensive, and, since all Miriam really needs to do with her closet is hang clothes on hangers, she really just needed some rods.  I decided to make a two-tiered set up, with one rod high, and another lower, to make the best use of the space.  Some website somewhere probably explains exactly where to place rods when building a closet, but I didn’t bother looking; I just took a couple a couple blouses and dresses on hangers, and held them up in the space, and marked for my rods that way, remembering that I couldn’t place the top rod too high for Miriam to reach.

I first cut four equal lengths of 1×4 from a longer piece, then marked out their positions on the closet wall, using a line level to make sure they were all placed correctly.  I used my wonderful Spax screws and screwed the 1×4 pieces through the drywall, into the studs, which I had marked ahead of time.  On the already existing right wall, a stud was situated ideally about twelve inches from the back wall, but there seemed to be no stud at the back right corner, so I had to use toggle bolts at the back.  On the left wall, which I erected, I knew that I had a stud twelve inches out from the wall (again, the perfect position for placing a flange for a closet rod), and I knew that I had a stud butted up against the existing back wall, too, so I could drive my Spax screws into studs at the front and back of the 1×4 strips into which I would screw the flanges for the rods.  Of course, I could have just screwed my flanges by themselves directly into the studs, but by installing them into pieces of 1×4, I made convenient supports for shelves.  For rods I used one and a quarter inch poplar dowels.  They were a few cents more than steel conduit, but much easier to cut, and somewhat less industrial-looking.

Yesterday, Miriam hung her clothes in her new closet, and it made me happy to think that she will get so much use out of something I made.

Filed under: House on March 24th, 2010 | 1 Comment »