Die Wall, Die!

This is what happens when you forget to add some thingamabobbers behind the wall before drywalling and have to cut a hole into your newly painted wall. The 50" uber TV will be mounted this week!

We also ordered the hardwood floors. It will take until Mid-July to arrive, but we think it's worth it. Check out it's Imperial Teak hawtness. We had talked about Brazilian Cherry before but thought they may be a bit too red'ish for my tastes. After that we liked Brazilian Walnut, but the teak was a little bit cheaper, less red, and we just liked the grain better. Who knows, maybe we'll change our mind in another week because we're finicky like that.



The Queen's brother helped out this weekend by painting the ceiling. He succesfully coated the ceiling, and his face with paint splatter. He did a great job on both accounts, and his help was greatly appreciated. :-)

Gratuitous Loki shot!

Wood Floor Choices

Deciding on wood types for major items in a house is a conundrum. I selected a maple cabinet with a cherry-like finish, but am waffling on what floors to use in my living room floor. Before berating me for covering the old floors with subfloor, realize that they are an old pine with lots of gaps and squeakiness. They are easily dented and scratched and not worth the money to refinish. Even if I did refinish them, the wood on the stairs doesn't quite match, so it would only make this issue more obvious after refinishing. So, now that the subfloor is in I need to choose what type of wood floor to put in.

My main criteria for judging a floor are,

A. Look good
B. Low Maintenance

To minimize maintenance I believe in the Janka scale. Wikipedia says "The Janka test measures the force required to embed a 11.28 millimeter (0.444 inch) steel ball into wood to half its diameter.". While I don't need to know the actual force for this task, it offers a good comparison of wood hardness, and hence durability of the wood floors. A high Janka scale number coupled with a nice finish means that I don't need to worry about scratches and dents. For a reference point, oak is about 1300 on the janka scale while pine is between 300 and 600, depending on the species.

My main contender is Brazilian Cherry (Jatoba). I am a bit concerned with using such a dark color in a row home with such little light, but I like the general look of it and it has a Janka hardness of 2350 (oak is around 1300), so it should hold up pretty well. I also considered something called Brazilian Cherry Lite, which looks similar but is a bit lighter. More research showed Cherry Lite is actually referred to as 'Guajara', and has a hardess of around 1300. Not a fan of such a soft wood. Also, seeings as I will most likely have darker wood furniture in the home, I'm not sure both dark woods and furniture would look good.



Another option I like is hickory. It has a Janka scale of around 1800, and looks totally different than the Jatoba. It has a high variance across boards that could either be interepretted as interesting, or ugly. I'm not sure which is a better assessment... To me the floors look modern, and while I like them, I am worried about being too bold. The darkness of the cherry makes for a cozier look, while the hickory seems to offer a cooler look for the room. What are your thoughts? Any other high hardness woods that look good? Let's try to keep it around $4.00 a sq ft or less - extra points for engineered hardwood, and no way on laminate.



I am also still deciding on how to run the floors. Most likely I will run them planks running the length of the house, but am also considering running them at a 45 degree angle. I think running them at an angle could add some visual interest.

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I also decided on stools for the breakfast bar today. I'm going with Holsag Carole's, in a wild cherry finish (matches the cabinets) and a gray'ish black seat. They take about 4-6 weeks to arrive, so it will be a while until Leigh and I are able to enjoy them.

Kitchen Pictures - Before & During

The downstairs kitchen renovation began in September of 2007, almost one year after the initial purchase of the house and has been continuing since. The kitchen used to be on the stairway side of the house, but after much convincing by the parents we decided to switch it to the opposite side of the house.

I looked back for pictures that show just how bad the kitchen was, but being such an eyesore I wasn't excited to photograph it. Here is the best shot I have showing the kichen area before the renovation. Notice the kitchen on the stair-side wall, no downstairs bathroom, the old door, two windows, the lovely hole in the ceiling that happened one day before my parents visited, and the plaster & drywall on the stair wall (at least until this weekend).



I really wanted a bathroom downstairs, as there was only one bathroom in the house (unless you count the throne in the basement, which I'll get to later). I would have really liked to have an island, but putting a half bath in the middle of the house made the middle area pretty useless. A bathroom there would have left a width of about 6', too narrow for a table, making the house feel cramped. Now a half bathroom is fit in the back corner of the house allowing a real dining room. A lot of homes in Baltimore city have odd floor plans due to the skinny rowhomes floorplan here, so anything done to maximize the space helps. Here is a shot of the new kitchen with a half bath where the old kitchen was. Also notice the outlet and cable hook-up for my (eventual) swivel-mounted LCD TV to watch from the breakfast bar. :)



Since I couldn't have an island and a bathroom downstairs, we decided to put in an L-shaped kitchen with a peninsula coming out in the main area of the house. To lighten up the room I chose glass faced cabinets and had lights put in them. Glass shelves were put in the cabinets, and the glass frosted to diffuse the light. It looks pretty sweet, and when the triple-pendant light over the penisula is put in it will look pretty sweet.



Friday and Saturday the tile went in, so that looks pretty sweet. Definitely glad I went when the running pattern, and the 12x18" tile run along the length of the house. It helps elongate the room, methinks. The sign on the floor says "keep off", but I don't think Cat paid attention to it.



Some miscellaneous info on the kitchen. The cabinets are Kraftmaid, with Putnam maple doors in a Toffee finish. The upper cabinets are 42", with an angle crown molding above and a smaller molding on the bottom to allow for under cabinet lighting to be installed later. Next to the bathroom on the stair-side wall is a pantry cabinet that is yet to be installed, with the fridge going next to that. The old 28" back door was replaced with a 32" wide to allow more light and larger sized furniture into the home. The door is glass, with a plastic film that looks like frosting when installed. A window on the right was removed from the back wall as the new bathroom wall would have intersected in the middle of a window. The window was replaced with a smaller opaque casement window to bring light into the bathroom.