Mounting the Television

We both liked the idea of putting the television above our mantle-less fireplace; it's out of the way, yet centrally located. The only problem with this is the cords — they have to go somewhere. With drywall mounting, you can drill a hole and run them inside the wall; not so with masonry.

Still, we figured we could work something out. I picked out a reasonably-priced TV mount that could handle a television of our size and weight, which also came with masonry options and instructions. Mounting securely into masonry requires lag bolts and shields, as well as big holes. The mounting hardware did come with plastic shields, but I bought some metal ones and used both, just to be on the safe side.

Mounting involved using a 1/2" masonry bit to drill six deep holes into the brick, shoving the lag bolt shields into the holes, then pressing the mount to the brick and screwing the lag bolts into the shields. The bolts cause the shields to expand outwards, applying lateral pressure to the inside of the holes, and securing the mount in place. We tested it for weight and Katie was able to hang off of it without any shifting or creaking.

Before hiding the cables and power cord

All that was left was attaching the television and hiding the cables, which include at the moment two HDMI cables and one power cord. I used a small cable hider to run the cables along the brick sideways, then down the outer edge of the fireplace. I painted the cable hider over the brick with acrylic paints in a mottled texture so that it would blend in with the brick:

The cable hider almost disappears in the right light.

The other half of the equation is what all those cables run to, which is this little end table:

In the open cabinet above are a receiver, a blu-ray player, an Apple TV and our modem/router. Below, behind the sliding doors, are all of our movies on disc. You'll also notice a little cat door behind the magazines — that's a little detail the house already had that we fell in love with. It leads to an elevated enclosed area in the garage where the litter box is kept. The cats essentially have a bathroom door, and the litter box is out of sight.

Here's the whole west-facing wall of the living room to get a sense of the television and media cabinet in context:

Go ahead and click... this one deserves to be seen full-size.

That's the view from our couch. I'm very happy with how it came out. I was a little worried that the screen would be too high and we'd be straining our necks every time we watched a movie, but that's not been the case at all. What I love most is that there isn't a whole piece of furniture dedicated to holding up the television, and the small end table to the right would make just as much sense in that corner were it not home to our media electronics.

Tiling the Kitchen Floor

After Katie stripped up the linoleum from the kitchen floor, we borrowed a tile cutter, bought our trowel, grout and quick-set, and got to work putting down our tile. Tiling takes a lot of foresight as to how much tile you'll need, where you'll be cutting, and how the spacing will affect all of that. We opted to use 1/4" spacing and used charcoal sanded grout, to match the dark tiles as closely as possible. Dark gray grout is also much more forgiving with floors, because dirt doesn't show up too readily, as it does with white grout.

The first two rows, meeting the cabinet corner

There's a bit of wiggling to make sure that your lines are straight consistent. The quick-set (the white adhesive base that the tiles go down on) dries quickly, so there's not a whole lot of time to get it right.

4 rows...

 I tiled in a snaking pattern, right to left, then left to right, and so on. I think this helped to keep the spacing even, but who knows; might have been just as clean tiling every row right to left. We cut as we went, rather than cutting all the tiles ahead of time. Cutting ahead of time, you might find that the spacing isn't quite what you'd anticipated when you arrive at the edge that requires a cut; cutting as you go guarantees you'll be cutting at exactly the size you need, but again, you do have to move quick, because the quick-set will dry out on you.

last row...

We were lucky and only needed to cut one corner, which you'll see at the edge of the cabinet in the above picture. Tile cutting can be tricky, and it's easy to snap the tile and have the cut split along a grain rather than where you've scored it, so it's good practice to have extra tile. We lost a few tiles to bad cuts, but some of them could be salvaged where very small pieces were needed, as around the edge of the cabinets. Overall, it was easy enough and came together pretty quickly.

enjoying a beer after a job well done

Once tiling was finished, we had to wait a few days (and keep off the floor) before we could grout.

We neglected to take any pictures of the grouting process, but it's pretty simple: I mixed a big bucket of the grout, slopped it over the tile, and used a rubber trowel called a float to spread it into the gutters and mush it in as flat and even as possible. The process left a haze all over that beautiful new tile, but all the haze wipes off the next day. After the grout has had time to cure, we sealed the grout, and our kitchen floor was finally ready to use!

sealing the grout

All in all, our kitchen was out of commission for about a week, but it was worth the work and the wait. The tiles plus all required materials (grout, quick-set, float, spacers, trowel, etc) probably came to between $325-$350 for our 70-ish square foot kitchen; well worth it to upgrade from cringe-worthy linoleum to sleek tile. Most of the investment is the labor itself, which, if you plan it out right and are careful with your measurements, isn't all that bad. Tiling (cutting as we went) probably took around four hours, grouting less than two, and sealing the grout maybe twenty minutes of work time for two coats. That's with no previous experience laying tile. It was easy enough that we're looking forward to re-tiling our bathroom, which is all white with white grout, and thus gets dingy easily. We may use the same tile in the bathroom as well.

The old floors...

finished floors today

New Kitchen Appliances

The only appliance the house came with was a white Kenmore range in the kitchen, so we had quite a few appliance purchases to make. I'm not going to make a post about our washer and dryer, but that was the first thing we bought. We chose an LG set in white. Since they were going in the garage it didn't matter what the finish was, but in the kitchen we wanted all stainless.

The space for a refrigerator is limited in our galley kitchen. As you can see below, there is no 'built in' area for one; the only space where it could go is against the wall on the right. At first we considered one with french doors, since that would provide half-sized doors that when opened wouldn't make the kitchen feel too tight, but the problem with most nice refrigerators these days is that they are HUGE.

We didn't want something big. Our eating habits do not include a lot of frozen or refrigerated foods that take up space, instead buying lots of fresh stuff which gets used quickly. We've always gone to the store every other day or so rather than once a week.

We started looking at shallow counter-depth fridges and liked the idea of those better, but then discovered and and ultimately decided on this even smaller European-style refrigerator that sits on a footprint of just over 24 inches deep/27 inches wide. It's also 6 feet tall:

The brand name is Summit. It's super efficient because the freezer is on the bottom. Everything in the upper fridge is easily accessible because it's all at waist height or above, so there's no bending over like in a traditional freezer-top version. There's even a built-in 5 bottle wine rack, which will always have at least one sparkling apple cider, one white wine, and one champagne chilling.

There are more shelves and two drawers not pictured, all equally sparse

And just today we got our new range. Since we had an existing one we were fine using for a while, it wasn't a priority. But with Thanksgiving next week and us hosting Nick's family the following week, it was time for that new one. 

Here is the old:

And the new:

Dining/Kitchen Decorative Shelving Removal

The overall goal for the house is to make it feel more modern and open. One of the things we decided early on needed to happen was removal of these two rounded shelves shown below. Located on the end of what I like to call 'the peninsula,' they protruded 8 inches into the walkway between the dining room and kitchen, and we would rather have the space than the shelves. And clutter-free living means getting rid of such unnecessary areas where junk tends to collect.

In the above photo, I've already removed the metal edging from both and taken the laminate off of the bottom shelf. It's the same terrible laminate as the countertop. 

Removing these were trickier than we first thought they'd be. It turns out that the shelves were not attached independently to the peninsula, but were built-in: they were extensions of the two drawer bases on the other side. My tools for this job were a crow bar, several chisels, and a drill.

Bottom shelf gone!

First I tried just using the chisel and hammer along the peninsula, but that wasn't enough to get through the wood. I ended up having to drill holes as close as I could get to the peninsula, which means that after hammering and chiseling along the edge where I had drilled I was left with dozens of small holes I needed to fill with spackle. No problem. 

Both shelves gone!

It's hard to see in the above photos, but they actually cut out the upper area of the trim to fit under the bottom shelf. When I filled the gouges with spackle, I also carefully sculpted spackle onto the trim to make it look like it was whole across the whole section. It may have looked ok uneven, but if I'm going to do all this work, I might as well do it right.

The last thing that needed to be done to get the true feel of the final dining/kitchen layout was cutting back the rounded countertop edge above where the shelves used to be. When we replace the countertop, we are only going to have the edge extend about an inch or so, whatever is standard. Below is where I drew a line and cut the counter top with a circular saw. After removing ~7 inches from the end of the counter, I was able to move the refrigerator over because the door was now free to open entirely without hitting it.

Notice the new floor!

With a single coat of paint on and the shadow of the counter top gone, I could more easily see where I still needed to fill and sand again, so I did that:

And then painted another few coats to finish both the upper section and the trim:

So much better than the original! Nick still needs to write his kitchen floor post, but you can see above what that looks like. And you can see a sneak peak at what the cabinets are looking like now compared to below...

Digging up and Moving an Apple Tree

I love that our yard is has some established fruit trees and berries. It's definitely one of the things we were looking for in property. Unfortunately that meant not getting to choose where the previous owners had planted those things. Most of it is fine, but for some reason there was a young semi-dwarf Pink Lady apple tree purposely planted in the middle of a garden bed full of golden raspberries. I thought that was pretty odd, but wasn't sure at the time whether we'd want to keep it there or move it. 

Here is a photo of that bed area from mid-summer. In the bed on the right you can kind of see the apple tree in with all the raspberries - it's the tall thing in the middle. 

Now that fall is here, it was time to make that decision. The younger a fruit tree is, the easier it is to transplant, and fall is the time to do it because they are entering dormancy. After brief deliberation, we decided to go ahead and move it nearby to the space between the the two garden beds, which we briefly used for tossing weeds during our first weekend of yard clean up. Most of those weeds had deteriorated nicely into compost soil, some of which I shoveled into the nearby beds.

Here's that area once I'd cleaned it out.

I found something strange when I was cleaning out this space: tile. There were almost a dozen pieces of tile laying between the beds, covered by dirt and grass and then the weed compost pile. Someone's attempt at preventing weeds or??? Not sure. But I used all of them to cover the compost which covered the weeds in the raspberry bed, trying to smother them out.

I also found two old stumps and root balls back in this area, nearer to the fence. Roots are so much easier to dig out when they've been dead for a very long time! This big thing was hardly any work.

Here's the Pink Lady in the raspberry bed pre-move:

And here it is in it's new location:

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I tilled this whole area down as far as I could go before digging the hole. Easily dug up the tree since it's still young and the roots aren't too large, and moved it over. I mixed in some of the soil from it's original planting with the new stuff, staked it to keep it straight, and watered. Now to see how well it handles the winter and then grows in the spring.

I'm really happy we decided to move it. It has it's own space now and will be easier to access for picking/pruning. This was a fun project, and because it was really nice for the past few days, it was a great break from doing things in the house.

New Addition to the Yard: Olives!

Since Portland's climate is so mild it's considered Mediterranean, we brainstormed about what kinds of additional plants we would like to have that might grow here. Nick said he'd really love to have some olive trees, so I did some research online and found that olives do in fact grow here. I even found this website, which is completely dedicated to growing olives in Oregon. They even have grove tours, and the following weekend was the last of the season, so I emailed them to get on the list.

Here is a photo of a row of their olive trees, which are really more like large bushes:

These olive trees are about 8 years old

This is a small family-owned grove located about an hour southwest of Portland. All of the information anyone could possible want about growing olives in Oregon is on the website. The guy who gave us the tour has tried all kinds of varieties and sells established cuttings of the ones that grow the best here.

We decided it would be really fun to grow our own even though it will take years to get a large harvest. Fortunately they are really easy. The grower said he doesn't water them because there is enough rain year round here and that he doesn't even prune them, though that's something we'll likely do to keep them looking clean and under control. 

They had several dozen varieties to choose from, and we decided to buy a single start of three different cultivars, which gives us ample opportunity for cross-pollination. Below are our olive babies, which are still doing great in their pots a month after we brought them home. The three kinds are Pendolino, Amfissa, and Santa Catarina. They are all table olives, which means we will cure them and eat them whole. The Amfissa and Santa Catarina olives are large and green, while the Pendolino are a smaller, darker variety. Chopped and mixed together they will make a great homemade tapenade.

Spring is the time to transplant these guys, so they will remain in their pots over the winter. Then we will plant them in the front yard near the street where they will all receive direct south/east sunlight, which is best for heavy olive production.

Tearing Up the Kitchen Floor

I remember this being one of the first things I did once Nick started his job and I began working full-time on the house. I have never seen such ugly flooring, which was motivation enough to get it done ASAP. It was also pretty easy.

Here's a before shot of the kitchen floor:

It was in such bad shape that it must have been the original flooring. There was evidence that it might have been covered by carpet at some point. I just can't imagine that the previous three owners just lived with it like this...

Pulling this up was pretty easy. Had to use a razor to scrape up at the edges and then pull using pliers once I had enough to hold. Once a large enough chunk was loose I could use my hands. Some areas came up more easily than others. Some in strips like below, but many areas in ripped, random chunks.

Below is the floor with all the linoleum removed. Still ugly, but much better. I also had to go over every inch and pull out small pointy broken staple pieces to prepare for laying the new tile.

Notice the mini-fridge on the right of the photo? The only appliance the house came with was the pictured range, so while we waited for our new fridge to be delivered/time spent laying the new tile/grout/sealant, we lived out of that mini-fridge. It's now in the garage and will eventually be a fully stocked drink fridge, especially once we start brewing our own beer, cider, and perry.

The tile below was my favorite after searching and we quickly agreed that it was perfect, though they weren't available in the store so we had to buy without seeing them in person:

After the floor was prepped, I measured and ordered 6 cases of the 16 x 16 size. It's called Marazzi Imperial Slate, in 'Black'. We laid the tile ourselves, but that will be another post on another day!

The Big Move! (And Then Our First Big Household Purchase)

Well we've been in our new house for almost two months and I haven't done an update since we've moved. Part if it is because I've been busy DOING things, and when I'm not busy doing things I'm enjoying being lazy. Also part of it is that working on the blog while living in Utah was a way for me to spend time with the house. Now I'm actually living in it!

Since the last post was about the Eames lounge replica we picked up on Craiglist, I'll start with this adorable picture of the cats enjoying it.

They handled the move like champs and quickly acclimated to their new home. We packed the moving truck and left Salt Lake City on the afternoon of September 14th. We spent the night at a pet-friendly hotel in Boise and then continued on to Portland. After some minor trouble on the road, we arrived at our beautiful home the evening of September 15th.

The first thing we did after unloading the moving truck the next day was take the truck to Ikea and pick up the couch we'd already picked out: the Karlstad, in black leather.

Our friend and upstairs neighbor in Salt Lake had the same couch, and we really liked it. What we didn't like were the terrible block legs that came with it, so we researched alternatives. Fortunately we found an Esty store where you can order tapered legs in a variety of finishes. We quickly ordered a set and got them in about a week, which is fantastic considering they are made to order. 

Here is a closeup of the end:

Changing the legs really made a huge difference. This really is Ikea's most stylish couch, and with the simple (and cheap) addition of tapered legs, it looks like some several thousand dollar mid-century modern style couches we saw while researching what to buy. It's also very comfortable!