Video Tour!

This series of videos shows a full tour of my house (minus the basement and attic). I really hope you guys enjoy this. I tried to keep the camera as steady as possible, but it's a bit shaky. I also messed up some of my dialogue in a few places, like where I show the bed and say "no mattress" when I meant to say "no bed, just the mattress".

I'll have update photos coming later, so just enjoy these for now. It turned out to be a lot longer than I thought, clocking-in at around 1/2 hour total.

House Tour Part 1


House Tour Part 2


House Tour Part 3

Boxing Day Score!

I usually never find anything great on Boxing Day, and I often don't even bother going out, but today I went with my Mom to see if the Christmas tree that I liked at Sears was on sale/reduced. I had seen it earlier this month, and it was originally priced at 199.99$, but reduced to 139.99$. I asked a sales associate if it might end up getting further reduced, and she told me "no, not at that price, it's already been marked down". But I was happy to see that all the Christmas decorations and the trees were 50-70% off. I got the tree for 59.99$ plus taxes (just under 70$). What an awesome deal.

I should just quickly mention that I've been looking at different artificial trees on and off for several years, and most of the ones I liked (pre-lit with realistic looking tips) were in the 400$ and-up price range, so finding this tree was a huge success for me. I'm really picky (since I will likely be keeping and reusing this tree for the next 10 or more years), so it was truly a lucky find, especially at that price.

While I was out, I was also hoping that I might find some nice discounted nutcrackers, but I didn't see any. The only two I found that were decent looking (at Canadian Tire) were a baseball one (which made me think of Alex from Old Town Home), and a basketball one, which looked cool, but I'm really not into sports. I did see a pirate one at Sears that I kinda liked, but the paint job and overall quality on it were only so-so.

I ended up getting a few ornaments, and 5 rolls of Debbie Travis gift wrap at Canadian Tire. I also went to Wal-Mart afterwards, and picked up several cheap DVDs. I picked up the 4th Pirates of The Caribbean, Tintin (which I haven't seen yet), Eagle Eye (which I also haven't seen, and have wanted to see for a few years - only 5$), Sherlock Holmes Game of Shadows, and season 6 of Supernatural. On top of that, I picked up some comfy new slippers, and coat hangers (which were conveniently on sale), since I always seem to need new ones.

I haven't taken the video tour of the house yet (because I'm a lazy bum and I still haven't done the dishes from the party yet), but I'll be doing that very soon.

There's not much else to update related to the house. In preparation for the party, I installed the vanity doors, and I've been working on another antique "Mogul base lamp" that was gifted to me for my birthday. This lamp was pretty much in shambles, and miraculously still had tattered remains of its original cloth cord and internal wire (some of which is in near new condition, and that I'll keep for possible future use). I had to buy a new 3-way switch for it, and partially refinish several of the metal pieces. This particular lamp has a faux onyx segment (disc) made from glass. It's missing the entire top portion as well (the portion which holds the large glass shade and mogul bulb/socket. I have a spare antique shade, but the missing lamp (body) parts will cost me around 30$ to replace. I also want to get an old style button plug for it (another 4$). I haven't decided weather or not I'd want to change the main cord on all three of my mogul lamps. This would cost around 50$ (for repro rayon covered wire), but it would look really awesome. I won't be spending money on that now, but I can always change these later.

Photos of the lamp, party, and vanity will follow in the next few days.

Exhausted

As I mentioned earlier, I'm having a Christmas party for the very first time at the house. This isn't the first party I host here, but it's the first time I'll be having a more traditional sit-down meal type party.

That said, I've been cleaning the house from top to bottom for the past 2 days (mainly today). I'm nearly done, and some of the food for tomorrow is ready to go. I have a last minute shopping trip tomorrow morning, and cookies to bake, but everything should work out alright.

Here's the long list of what I did/cleaned so far:

- Dusting everything (yes, everything, piece by piece)
- WASHING all the painted floors (by hand, with a rag and pail, on my hands and knees)
- Washing/cleaning all the mouldings, baseboards, and windows sills (you wouldn't believe how much dust had settled over the doors and windows - no one would see this, but I wanted a THOROUGH cleaning)
- Washing the tub/shower
- Washing the bathroom tile floor
- Washing the sink in the "guest bedroom" upstairs (lots of scrubbing with Comet & Bar Keeper's Friend)
- Passing the vacuum in the guest bedroom and "L room" (unpainted floors)
- Washing the main staircase (OMG it was atrocious)
- Vacuuming the living room and dining room
- Washing everything in the kitchen (including the mouldings, cabinets, and the blue cupboard with everything on it), stove, fridge, etc.
- Washing the PC, keyboard, mouse, speakers, tower, monitor, and desk

I also re-potted and did "maintenance" on the bulk of my house plants yesterday. That was a huge job in itself (I have roughly 2 dozen), which took probably over 2 hours. This included replanting several of them, trimming-back roots, and planting a whole bunch of new cuttings that have been in water for months. I also took the time to WASH all the plants. The leaves on most of them were coated in dust.

This has been on my to-do list for probably around a year. Many of them were pot-bound, or getting straggly.

Left to do in the next hour (I'm on a break):

- Wash all the tile floors on the main floor (rag and pail)
- Wash the basement staircase (it's filthy)

So pretty much the entire house is now dust free (as much as it can be), and I'm 80% ready for my party. I still have the cookies to bake (as mentioned), and the serving dishes to wash (dinner plates, bowls, glasses, utensils).

That said, since the house will be so nice, and all the junk is put away, I'll probably be making a "walking house tour video". I've wanted to do one for a while. It's always much better to sense the scale and feel of a house through a video than through photos, and I won't be too ashamed of all the mess since it's all clean. You'll also be able to see the Christmas decorations since they're hard to photograph (because of the angles and where they are).

Keys~

I have been having issues finding proper keys for some of my mortise locks. My locksmith (the one near me at least) carries a few different universal keys, and he also has a huge key-ring of antique keys I can pick through, but it's still often hard to find ones that work. Sometimes the blade is just a hair short, or the blade is too wide, and often, the old keys have been re-cut or otherwise butchered.

The other problem I'm having is sheer cost. Skeleton keys aren't THAT expensive, but at 7$ per key, they add up quickly. I don't need a ton of them, but I thought I would try a Google search in hopes of finding cheap suppliers. Well, as it turns out, blank skeleton keys are nearly impossible to find. There are numerous sets of ugly, cheaply made repro keys from places like House of Antique Hardware, Historic Houseparts, Van Dykes Restorers, and even on Amazon, but none of those were what I wanted. The majority of them are also brass. NO traditional skeleton keys are brass. The only brass keys I've ever seen are clock keys, or occasionally very elaborate door lock keys on something likes a china cabinet.

I decided to try eBay and Etsy. I got two lucky finds (which you can see below), but they are still very hard to come by. I would have thought that blank skeleton keys would be fairly ubiquitous, but I guess not. I said these were lucky finds, because they were well priced. Several sellers have keys at around 4$ or 5$ (choice + shipping), but that's a pain in the rear if you're looking for a certain style of key. When you factor in that shipping on one key is around 4$, it's just not worth it. Other sellers have huge lots of 50+ keys, but they're asking over 100$. That's rather pointless.

I should have enough of these 6 keys for pretty much the whole house, and they ended up costing around 4$ to 5$ each including shipping.





As a bit of a side note, cutting these keys to a custom design is actually extremely simple. When you open on of these locks you can clearly see where the notch needs to be. All you need is a few files and a bit of patience. Optionally, a bench grinder can be used to remove more material.

A Quick Restoration & A Small Disaster!

I don't recall exactly when I bought this little medicine cabinet, but I'm fairly sure I shared some photos of it before (on this blog). I bought it for a few dollars (possibly even just 1$, I can't remember), and I remember it was in the basement of a "whole house contents" type sale. The kind of sale where it was likely an old lady (or couple) who lived there and passed away. I remember buying several neat things at this sale, and I bought this cabinet right off the wall. I had to unscrew it (which was luckily just 2 screws).

I'm not sure how old it is, but it's AT LEAST 1950 (I know this for a fact, see below), but more likely 1930s or 40s.

This is more or less how I purchased it: absolutely filthy. It also sat in the basement for maybe a year now.





Let me just say that these two photos (above) don't do the grime justice. It was pretty plastered with a layer of old dust, making the formerly white paint a dingy yellowish grey. The interior (which you'll see shortly) was far worse.

The mirror is not the original one (which must have broken), and this replacement (but still OLD) mirror was loose in the door, so I removed it. In doing so, I found a folded sheet of newspaper, dated April 23rd 1952.



The mirror BARELY fits in the door (it's smaller than it should be and I had to use spacers around it when I put it back in), but it has a wonderful aged look (I'm a huge lover of antique mirrors, and I have over a dozen), so I wanted to clean it and reuse it. The mirror must have been a low-end one, since the backing paint was hand painted with a brush (higher quality mirrors have a sprayed or rolled painted film on the back). The black edges appear to be in between the glass and the paint, so it's actually the silvering that is "damaged" or tarnished. It might have been originally in a frame that covered these edges... who knows.



Here's how the interior looked (I also removed the back to be able to clean inside it properly). When I said it was filthy, I wasn't kidding!



You can see how the glossy old oil paint cleaned up pretty well in that photo. I used a damp cloth dipped in ample amounts of Comet, and a little bit of dish soap as a lubricant. I went over EVERY INCH of this cabinet with this mixture. It took about 1/2 hour or so, but I was left with this:



Far from perfect, and it did nothing for the poorly painted spots (the original paint was a mustardy beige (see above), or all the paint chips, but everywhere else, the paint is now shiny and clean.

I installed one of my new repro catches on it, since it was the closest hardware that fit (including some old catches I had on hand). It looks a bit odd to have the bright brass unpainted, but unless I paint over the whole thing again, I can't match this "aged off-white" old enamel paint, so it's staying as-is. The other option might seem obvious: remove the hinges and strip those, but they are really heavily painted, and the paint around them would probably chip badly, and then I'd have to repaint the whole thing again...



Like I said, still lots of paint chips, but it's CLEAN now.



DISASTER STORY!

Alright, I've said it before, but it never stops me from doing it anyways: Don't Pick At It!

What do I mean? Well, here's a little story. As you know, I've been working on the L Room casings for the past 2-3 days, getting it ready to paint. In doing that, I was using a chisel to scrape and pry-off large chunks of drywall mud (and paint, and wallpaper bits, and specks, and staples, and...) and when I was working on the left-side window, I uncovered a "soft spot" where the wallpaper (and dozens of paint layers over it) was loose off the drywall. I already knew about this, but I didn't think it was very big, and I thought I'd ignore it.

Here's where the "Don't pick at it" comes into play. I had the choice to either ignore it and move on, or scrape away the loose stuff. Guess which option I picked?

YIKES!



Now, let me just explain to you exactly what you're seeing. See that pinkish papery section at the top with a brown edge? That's not wallpaper. That's the actual drywall paper! The portion of wall below this must have gotten wet (leaky window, or the window might have been left open in bad weather), and the drywall soaked up some water. The actual paper facing came loose off the interior plaster/fibre layer. The light fuzzy brown portion on the lower part is the interior plaster layer showing, with just "fuzz" left from the paper.

The other issue (other than the missing paper), is that now the difference in thickness is about 1/8". No I'm not exaggerating here. There's a lot of plaster/mud smeared around on the walls, maybe 2-3 layers of wallpaper, dozens of coats of paint, and that pink you see above is Calcimine.

Luckily, this old 1920s drywall is pretty hard, and it won't crumble or do anything awful with the paper layer missing, so I secured it in place with extra screws (to keep this section from flexing around).



This whole wall is absolutely TERRIBLE (one of the worst ones in the house), so I don't feel bad about just doing a "good enough" patch job here.

Coat 1:



Coat 2:



I laid on the mud fairly thick, and as evenly as possible, so I'm hoping this will be enough. I will do a rough sanding, then another "patch" coat to fill in any valleys (I know there will be some). Basically just 1-2 thin touch-up layers, and I'm calling it good.

What do you guys think? Have you had to do similar "good enough" repair jobs?

"L Room" Update

Y'know, it's not until I cleared out most of the "L Room" that I remembered how freakin' BIG of a room it is. The main portion is around 9' x 12', plus the "L" portion is another 5 1/2' x 5 1/2', which gives roughly 138 square feet of floor space.

I've cleared out the room so that I can work on the baseboards and the windows.

More soon.

Party Prep & House Progress!

Alright, I'm still figuring out how I want to lay out the table, but things should work out okay with the blue napkins/placemats. I also dug-out some brand new cutlery that I had bought years ago, and a new set of 8 glasses (also bought ages ago). The great thing about these is that I didn't have to spend any money on them. All I really need are wine glasses, and I'll get those either at Wal-Mart or the dollar store (not something I'll use often, but handy to have, since I like entertaining).

New cutlery:



Glasses (which match my "day-to-day" ones, but they're not the same size):



And so far, this is more or less how the table will look. Everything is laid out, but I still have to wash everything. Plus, the party is only in a week or so.



EDIT: Oh! I also totally forgot to mention this, but the crummy old table I'm currently using in the dining room didn't have any leaves for it (it was a 10$ yard sale find), so I ended up making one out of an old door from the former upstairs kitchen! I just sawed-it down, and routed out spots for the pegs (I couldn't actually drill holes for the alignment pegs since the door had a wide routed lip around it). It's not perfect, but with a table cloth over it, and a few wooden cleats under it to keep it in place, no one would ever know!

House Stuff!

I did a bit of work on the house today, and two things got done.

I decided to finish painting/finishing the shade holders, and rewiring the antique light fixture in the "L Room" upstairs. I wasn't sure if I'd have enough wire to do the fixture, but as it turns out, I did.







And yes it will have to come down again when I finally have a chance to work on the ceiling drywall.

You can see the fixture (unlit, but half finished) in this past post:
PAINTING! And How to Install Crown Moulding by Yourself!

And a job that I've been putting off for probably a few months now, is finally done (except for final nail hole putty sanding): installing the rest of the baseboards in the "L Room". I've been dreading this simply because it's an outside mitre on two long boards (hard to cut on the table saw), and I also wanted to make sure which pieces of baseboard, from my stock of new and old pieces, I should use. I ended up going through ALL my baseboard pieces, measuring them, and writing down a full list, then measuring ALL the walls in the house that need baseboard reinstalled (some was butchered, some was damaged, and I removed most of it from the main floor). Then I assigned pieces to certain rooms based on lengths (all on paper with a sort of map), and ended up with some usable pieces. I actually have almost enough pieces for all the main rooms except the dining room, and 2 or 3 10 foot lengths (which will have to be new stuff).

That said, here's the (mostly) finished corner!



Once the putty can be sanded, I can go ahead and silicone both doorways (main and closet) in that room, check the rest of the old baseboards, and then prime and paint all of it. But I might wait until I finish the two windows, and do everything in one shot.

Dinner Party!

A friend of mine gave me a gentle push to finally do a Christmas party this year. For several years, I had been hosting a "non traditional" Christmas party at my apartment, and I invited everyone who could attend. The more the merrier.

I'm fairly sure that my first real "dinner" party was my 2005 "Asian Dinner Party", where I made a huge assortment of Chinese/Japanese dishes for everyone, which included: won-ton soup, udon soup, dumplings, pork and green onions, fried rice, and a bunch of other things (including sugar cookies for desert). I slaved over the stove for hours (days, really) and everything was made entirely from scratch. Thankfully, everything was delicious, everyone had a great time, and I was happy to cook for my friends. Prior to this party, we only had casual get-togethers.

I haven't hosted a Christmas party since I bought the house in 2010. And my excuse has been that the house is a disaster and I didn't feel like it (since it's generally a lot of work and planning).

But this year my friend Gen told me that I should make one anyways, and that all of my friends know that it's a mess because I'm renovating, and they don't care. And she has a point.

So with that, I decided to post an invite on Facebook, and I'm aiming for a close friends only, "Last Minute Christmas Party", with mostly just people that I'm fairly sure will be able to attend. This makes things less stressful for me, since I usually have to hunt people down to find out if they're coming or not.

I also planned a very simple (non Christmassy) menu of:
- Caesar Salad
- Chicken Noodle Soup (since I have a few fussy eaters)
- Chili & Buns
- with Wine / Soft Drinks

I haven't decided if I want to do a dessert, but if I do it will be something like brownies & ice cream (since I've been craving some and it's an easy dessert to make).

***

With all that said, I'm assuming that all 8 invited guests will show (though 2-3 may not), and if I have anything "extra" then too bad. With that in mind, I've started to hunt down decorating items, dishes, and planning some sort of table setting.

I already have a lot of stuff still packed (decorations & dishes), and I've been hanging artificial spruce branches, bows, and other wreaths and decorations around the main floor.

I also went to Value Village (hey I'm on a TIGHT budget this year) to see if I could hunt down any good finds. I actually got really lucky and bought 2 beautiful (festive) table cloths for 6-7$ each. One is a bright red with 3 patterned (in white and black) stripes, while the other is a "Country Plaid" type pattern in a light green.

I also went and got a few things from the dollar store, like clear plastic table cloth protectors (since a bunch of us are accident prone and I don't want to ruin my nice newly acquired table cloths), more artificial spruce garlands and bows, and an additional cheapie red table cloth. Then I made another stop and picked up some candy for party favours. And lastly, I went to Wal-Mart and picked up some silk flowers for centre pieces/decorations.

One thing I'm excited about, though, is that I can FINALLY put my Currier & Ives dinnerware to good use. I've had this lovely old fashioned set of dishes for several years, and I have yet to use it.

The newspaper wrappings on it are from 2007, and I wouldn't be surprised if I bought it around that time, or not long after. I know I bought it while I was still living at the apartment. I happened to find this "set of 9 settings" at a yard sale for pretty cheap. I think I paid around 30 or 35$ for the whole box full. The reason that the "set of 9" is in quotes is because I'm pretty sure that it was originally a set of 10, since I have a one or two items in the set with 10 each. I was told that no pieces were chipped, but this was a lie, and I didn't look too carefully through the box before buying it. As it turns out, there are 7 chipped pieces, and one with a huge blob of clear glaze (right in the middle of one of the unchipped dinner plates). If I count the pieces missing to make a complete set of 10 (including replacing the chipped ones) I'd need an additional 12 pieces.

I actually never really looked up any information on this set until this evening, and I'm surprised to find that it's actually worth a bit of money. The average "street price" (eBay or Etsy) is around 5-10$ per piece! So those 12 replacement pieces would set me back about double or triple what I paid for the whole set.

Here's the bulk of it (note the green plaid table cloth and silk flowers, which aren't really arranged yet):



Luckily the chips are very small, and I'm not too bothered by most of them (though one plate has like 3 chips on it). I only have 5 "good" dinner plates, so some of the chipped ones will be used anyways. I'm 99% sure NO ONE will notice. That is, unless they've read this first.

Here's what a full place setting would look like (with all 6 pieces). In there is a dinner plate, soup bowl, bread plate, dessert plate, and a cup & saucer.



I'm really not sure if I want to use those fun blue striped napkins. They're the only ones I have, and I love them (also never used them yet), but they don't really match the Christmas theme. I have nothing blue except maybe some Christmas ornaments (balls?), which I might be able to work in there? Also, I will NOT be using all 6pcs for the settings. I'll be using 3, and if people want coffee or tea, then I'll use the cups/saucers "per person" as required. It will mostly be just the plate, bowl, and bread plate. I'll have a water glass, and a wine glass.

I was also happy to see that the set also has a bunch of other pieces that I could add to it, like a gravy boat, butter dish, serving platters, and a salt and pepper shaker. I don't think I'd really need any of these pieces, but maybe the gravy boat or S&P shakers would be nice to have.

Apparently this set was manufactured up until around 1986, and is now discontinued. I would not have thought this set was that old, since it looks like it was barely ever used (probably only once a year since then, and then boxed and put away when the owners didn't like it anymore and sold it). The only reason I know that it's not brand new is that there are a few chips, and the odd piece has one or two barely visible knife scratches on them.

I really do like the pattern, though. It reminds me of some similar dishes we had when I was younger, and also of some dishes that my grandmother had.

So what do you guys think? Should I try to find red napkins to complement the table cloth and look more Christmassy, or just go ahead with the funky blue ones?

I also need to see if I can find my cutlery. I have a nice set somewhere that I've also never used... I swear I'm not a pack-rat!

Vanity (Design)

It's very late, but I'm not feeling particularly tired, so I thought I would make a post.

I thought I would discuss the vanity a bit.

The design I chose was made to look old, and made (as much as possible) to compliment the style and details of the house, while also trying to look fairly "timeless". I really wanted to build something that I would still like 10 years from now, or even 30 years from now. Something that is well made and nice enough that future owners might also appreciate it.

When I started renovating the bathroom, I knew I wanted the room to be fairly simple, light, and with plain white fixtures. I love natural materials, which led me to choose slate for the floor. I don't regret my choice, but at the time I wasn't really trying to make a "period correct" bathroom.

In hind sight, if I were to start over, the ONLY thing I would have chose differently would be the tile. I would have picked a hex tile. HOWEVER, the slate was really well priced, and I don't know if I would have wanted to splurge too much on the hex tile, plus there's the fact that it's white (unless I picked a non-period colour), and it would have been a huge pain for me to keep clean, so the slate was overall still the best choice.

I did, however, know that I would want to make an "old looking" vanity, or recycle an antique dresser into one.

Originally, I wanted a freestanding (centered with the sconces/mirror) cabinet (ie: not touching the wall on the right), but I later decided that this wouldn't be practical, so I had to work this into my design.

I began searching for, and hoarding, images of nice looking, or period bathrooms. This was HARD. Period bathrooms are almost non-existent, and one of the only good sources I found for images was "Old House Dreams" which is a blog that lists old homes for sale. I also got a few images through Old House Web (forum).

Here are a few examples from my stash of around 140 photos. These are some of the "best" and most intact bathrooms I've found on the web. You will find (if you're also searching for similar material) that most period/Victorian bathrooms had pedestal sinks, or slab marble sinks on decorative brackets (sometimes with legs). It's fairly rare to find sinks with wooden cabinets (which is what I was looking for).

"Pre-Sanitary Era" bathrooms tend to have frequently had beautiful wood tongue and groove around the room.



"Sanitary Era" bathrooms from around 1900 were often done in floor-to-ceiling white tile, and often had beautiful nickel plated and glass accessories. Much of these accessories now fetch 100's of dollars at salvage stores.



Here is a fairly typical, simple wooden cabinet found in a Victorian "pre-sanitary era" bathroom.



This one I think is part of a bedroom. Many older homes had small private sinks.



Here is a rare and interesting find. A double marble sink with blue decorated sinks, and a wooden (Victorian) cabinet base. I also assume that the grate in the door is for some kind of ventilation?



Lastly, this was a very rare find, and I believe this image was posted on OHW. This is a Victorian luxury bathroom, and I have to assume that all the fancy woodwork would have been in mahogany or oak. But this photo was the main inspiration for my vanity.



One theme that you'll notice in these photos is that ALL of them have white marble counter tops (unless it's a ceramic pedestal). This is the main reason I want marble.

On top of original bathrooms, I also based my design off some original kitchen and butler's pantry details.

Here's a few of those (note mainly the doors):









So that's how I ended up with this:



And now it's almost 4am!

Z_z

Vanity!

Before going into the vanity install, I'll show off the finished living room ceiling repair.

The white primer shows up a lot more in the living room, and I'm going to go ahead and guess that one of the POs (who smoked) used to spend more time in this room. That, and I think a little bit of the old shellac is also bleeding through the white.

The ceiling repair in this room was made much more complicated because of where I had to cut-back the old ceiling (last year). It was also made more complicated because the boards I had on hand were only JUST long enough to reach the nearest stud before the light fixture. Luckily I had enough other bits from the Office to do the short ends.

Before (as in, how it's looked for the past year):





Quick side note: look at that wonderful wood peeking through! The ceiling was originally done in shellac over choice lumber. It would have looked wonderful several decades ago. Wood ceiling, wood crown, window and door casings, and old wooden windows. And if you remember correctly, the living room used to be a bright peacock blue originally.

Here are the "short ends" in place. The one contouring the electrical box was fun to cut. My jigsaw is kinda "dead" so I cut that BY HAND with a coping saw. Not only did I cut it by hand, but I cut it TWICE, since I mis-measured the first piece.



You can just barely tell which are the two new lengths (and it wasn't even puttied or patched at this point), but near the wall, you can see a wider gap where the two new boards were fitted (much like the office ones).



Lots of putty, sanding, and silicone later, and with a quick coat or primer, you can barely tell it was repaired. Note: the entire ceiling will get repainted later on.



Now for the vanity. This was a pain, and I knew it WAS going to be one, but it's over and done now.

Why a pain? Well, just because of all the detailed fitting and installation.

First I shut off the water, drained the pipes and de-soldered the shut-off valves. Then I did a small modification to the hot water pipe's location. I decided I didn't want them using up almost all of the back portion of the cabinet. This gives me the space to make/install a custom storage rack on the left side (if I want).



Then there was the actual fitting of the vanity into place. The following photo had terrible yellow lighting (mainly from the bright CFLs in the sconces), but you can see several important details in it. I knew I was going to need to lift and replace the vanity in it's spot (over the two pipes) several times to make sure all my scribing and fitting was good, so I chose to protect the walls and door casing with a double layer of large paper sheets from a big roll that I have. Alternatively, thin cereal box cardboard would also work well. It's not the end of the world to have to do a paint-touch-up, but it's much easier to just avoid it completely.

I chose to drill the drain hole last, to get the most precise location possible, which is why you won't see the hole in the first photo(s).



In the above photo, you can see that I have the baseboard cut, and the vanity slid down to he floor. It has also been raised up off the floor slightly and levelled using shims. Everywhere on the vanity edges where you can see green painter's tape, is a spot that needed scribing.

Because the house has a lot of settling towards the centre (as is usual with older homes), the side near the toilet had to be cut-down by about 3/4". It also had to be scribed along the relatively uneven edge of the tile floor. My tiling job was fairly good, but the tiles themselves still have quite a bit of texture and bumps. The best way to mark your scribing is to have the cabinet level, and then, starting at the highest spot off the floor, make yourself a block of that height, with which to trace along the bottom of the cabinet all the way around. At the high spot, you will barely make a line, but as you go around the cabinet, the height of the scribe line will get higher up where more material needs to be removed.

In ideal cases, the scribing is minimal, and you can sometimes just use shims (especially if your toe-kick gets attached separately). At work, all our cabinet boxes use adjustable plastic legs (which you can nail into and cut-down if needed).

Part of the "huge pain" was to remove that 3/4" section off the left side of the cabinet. Remember, this is solid rock maple. I have no working jig saw. I ended up cutting 90% of it with a circular saw*, a bit of it with a router (using a straight bit), some of the corner chunk with a hand saw, and then up to the line with my (crappy) belt sander with a coarse 80 grit paper.

*Tips: when running any tool over a pre-finished surface, always mask it with tape, paper, or some other thin protective film. This will keep the surface scratch-free. You will be surprised how easily just sliding a router over a varnished surface can leave fine scratches.

Other areas that needed scribing were minimal (along the door casing, and a bit along the back wall).

Additional side note: The piece of twine that you can see under the vanity toe-kick was a loop used to go around the hot water pipe (and then around my foot). The pipe had just a HAIR of a lean towards the back wall, which made it impossible to slide the cabinet down onto the pipe without a second pair of hands. Since I'm doing this job solo, this worked out just fine.

Once all the fitting and trimming was done, and I had a sturdy, level cabinet; I re-soldered my shut off valves.

Safety first. This is a wooden cabinet, and a blow torch could very easily scorch the varnish, or make the wood catch fire, so I used a piece of metal flashing as a guard against the back.



Checking for leaks is always a bit scary for me since I have to run up and down two flights of stairs (from the second floor all the way down to the basement). Luckily all my pipe joints were good, and I had a leak free installation. Just in case, though, I had bunched-up a large bath towel around the base of the pipes in the cabinet.

The only thing left now, is to attach the hardware (I need 4 extra hinges), and screw it to the back wall. I'm waiting to screw the cabinet to the wall because I want to use some special screws from work with beige-painted washer-head tips.

These next few photos turned out really well, and the colours are quite accurate.





You can just make out the recessed toe-kick in this last photo.



So what do you guys think? White marble for the top? Granite? Soapstone? I would definitely prefer a solid counter top (stone or Corian) with and under-mount sink (which I already bought). But I'm still not 100% sure what to go with. White marble would definitely look classic/elegant/historic, but would it go well with the slate floor? Am I just second guessing myself? I don't necessarily like things that are too "matchy-matchy" but I'd be really interested in your thoughts and suggestions (as a fresh set of eyes).