The renovation thread

[Pyraxis]

A place to post your misadventures and victories in home improvement.

[Pyraxis]

Today's task was figuring out how to remove kitchen drawers from their rails so that I could paint them. I've already painted the rest of the kitchen cabinets in semi-gloss white on the inside, to cover up the previous owner's stains. I couldn't do the drawers while they were still in place, though. I have access to almost zero tools right now, but a coworker was so kind as to lend me his screwdriver with replaceable tips, the kind with a dozen different tips stored in the handle.

Drawers turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I started by unscrewing everything I could find to unscrew, which led to an unsteady rocking drawer, but the drawer was still stuck on the rollers and the rollers were still stuck to the inside of the cabinet. It seemed physically impossible to access the last two screws. Then I figured out there was a mechanism that was hooking the drawer in place. My fingers were too fat to get in there and trigger it, but I used a leftover paint stirrer on each side to make the mechanism rock out of the way, and then the drawer could slide out. Turned out I didn't need to unscrew all that stuff after all. 

It looked like this:


Drawer #3 was more complicated because it was in a corner and the handle of the adjacent cupboard stopped it from coming out all the way. I had to take off the cupboard door to be able to get to the mechanism. By the time I got all three drawers out, there was no time left for painting, I had to go home (to the temp housing) and make dinner so I didn't end up gnawing the cabinet doors.



Yesterday's task was painting the room that's going to be my bedroom, so today I also got to strip off all the painter's tape and plastic and admire it.

[renaeden]

I really like the colour of your room, it's cheerful.

I have never heard of anyone painting the inside of kitchen cupboards before but I think it's a pretty good idea if there's stains that won't come off. How were the fumes?

[Queen Victoria]

That is about the colour of the carpeting in my room when I lived with my parents.  It went very well with the fruitwood bedroom set.  I always called it Howard Johnson's Orange.

[Pyraxis]

I didn't know carpets came in that colour.

The carpet is going to be a natural greenish brown with a faint diamond pattern, flecked with threads of other colours. I'm planning to use forest green as an accent colour here and have natural wood baseboards and lots of houseplants.

One of the walls, at the head of where the bed goes, is made of that awful plywood fake wood panelling instead of drywall. It's painted over several times, old, and buckling... I have a dream of replacing it with an accent wall of real wood panelling. I need to look up that fruitwood colour you mentioned, QV. I had been thinking a deep dark brown or else very pale (but not white).

I'm sure my orange is too bright for most people.  That's all right, I'm the one that's going to be sleeping in it.

[Queen Victoria]

Pyraxis, the 1960's and 1970's had a lot of unique colours.  Fruitwood is a fairly light toned wood.

[Phoenix]

That paint colour is very you!

['andersom']

Sturdy carpeting it was as well, in the days QV is talking about. My brother is now ripping out the orange carpet my parents chose for the second floor in their house in 1971. It almost looked as new, despite four kids using the floor a lot there. Bit more of a brown tone than your walls, just as bright.

I had an orange wall in those days. Five years later I got two even brighter and more saturated orange walls and part of the ceiling in that colour too. Other wall was granny Smith green. And one with jute.

[Jack]

I didn't know carpets came in that colour.

When thinking of 60's carpeting, orange comes to mind first.

[Queen Victoria]

Mine was was low pile solid orange.  Thankfully we never shag.

[Pyraxis]

 

[El]

I like what the light does to that shade of orange.