Mounting the TV

Hello Everybody! I hope you all had a good weekend! It snowed here in the DC area, not a lot but enough to keep me indoors. Don't you hate it when the cold gets in the way of plans/productivity? Well, one productive thing that happened over the weekend was that our friends John and Natasha came over to help mount the TV we got for Christmas. Actually, it was more like Justin and John mounted the TV and Natasha and I were there for moral support. Oh, and you can't forget these guys...they were there for moral support as well!

 

 

Here's a shot of Scobey and Louie doing their best sit and Derby being a creeper in the background

 

 

Anyway, I digress...so we got a mount from Amazon for about $50 and was delivered pretty quickly, definitely less than the estimated 5-7 days. The picture instructions seemed pretty straight froward. "Idiot proof" is what Justin called it.

 

Here are some shots of them either opening the box or screwing in the brackets into the back of the TV (I can't really tell)...



 

 

 

 Here's a shot of the brackets they put on the back of the TV... 

 

 

They first installed the wall mount and made sure it was anchored in properly and centered. It really helped that John brought his professional grade tools since I doubt our poor little drill could've handled drilling holes in brick/concrete.

 

 

The cool thing about this particular wall mount is that it has a swinging arm so you can angle the TV towards the kitchen. That way, if I ever want to cook while watching the Food Network  I can totally do so! ;)

 

 

Justin making the final adjustments...excuse the blurry, dream-like nature of these pics...it must've been the lighting...

 

 

And ta-da! A shot of the guys in front of finished product!

 

 

With the addition of our new TV, DirecTV is coming today to bring another receiver as well as install the Genie which allows for multiple, simultaneous recordings of our favorite programs, ready for viewing from any TV in our house. Woohoo! I'm sure that can't be good for our social life. LOL...

 

Although, I had no part in the install of the wall mount it looked pretty easy to do. Or at least the guys made it look easy. Can you believe there are install companies that charge +$100 for this type of service and for us it only cost price of the wall mount. Crazy, huh?

 

Have you ever wall mounted a TV or did you have someone do it for you? Would the size of the TV be a factor in doing it yourself?

Sandy vs. Ceiling



Yay! Another home improvement post since I know at times they can be few and bar between! While Justin and I were gallivanting around Europe, Superstorm Sandy was making it's way through the Northeast. Although we didn't get hit as bad as New Jersey and New York, the DC metro area was hit with its share of stormy weather. That stormy weather brought rain...a lot of rain. The amount of rain we received coupled with the intensity of it cause our roof to leak again, specifically in our new kitchen addition. It seems like we can't get a break when it comes to leaks, since I've discussed leaks on two separate instances here and here.

Here's some shots of the bubbly damage. Don't mind the mismatched paint. That is due to our contractor trying to touch up the paint, but using the wrong color/type. That's a whole other story all together...

Luckily, my sister was home dog-sitting, so she was able to do some damage control by preventing the further spread of the water.  With the careful placement of buckets and puppy pads, our cabinets weren't ruined and our floors were still in tact. Can you imagine if we we had come home to the storm damage without any of my sister's preventative measures? I'm sure it would've been a lot worse.

After some careful thought, Justin and I decided that it would be best if we filed an insurance clam.  We figured the amount of damage exceeded our deductible. The adjuster came a few days later, provided a write up, and told us that our water damage did exceed our deductible.  Our experience with the claims process was running smooth; however, instead of the insurance company finding a contractor to do the repairs, it was our job to find someone to fix the damage within the cost of our deductible. Justin did some research and decided on Carl's Home Improvement because he gave us the best price compared to other estimates we received.  In addition, he could start the project right away.

Here are some shots of the work in progress...

When he replaced the damaged drywall on the ceiling, he discovered that our former contractor didn't install the drywall properly. He didn't screw the drywall sheets in properly, and otherwise did a haphazard job. Why am I not surprised?

The cool thing about Carl was that after he starting working, he discovered that he didn't have to replace entire sheets of drywall.  Carl was able to just patch up the damaged parts, which resulted in him lowering our price, and finishing a day early! Because he was already under budget and ahead of schedule, we asked if he could could repleace our island light fixture with one that we picked up a few months ago.

So now instead of this little, ugly light fixture:

We have this:

It glows like a UFO. ;) It's a new light fixture to match our chandelier over our dining table. Here are some shots of the finished product.

Crack free ;)

The water damaged parts are all patched up, the ceiling is all painted uniformly, and all is good in the Briones household. :)

Week 19 (and beyond!): The Finished Product

After watching Justin and I on House Hunters many of you have asked about the kitchen.


"Did you finish the renovation?"


Yes, we finished filming in March and the kitchen was finished in late-April.


"Did Justin get the dream kitchen he always wanted?"


I would say, "yes." It offers enough room for the two of us and more. When he's cooking and I'm doing the dishes we don't get in each other's way, which is good. Of course, this is our first home so we do good with the space we have, however, there is always room for more kitchen space in the future.


Now without further ado, our kitchen!


Of course it features the stainless steel appliance suite that I discussed here.


To review a bit...here is the kitchen plan from Ikea:

And some pictures of the progress:


The old dining room leading to the kitchen

 Our pseudo-housewarming party (before the demo)

 

After the demo...

Building the addition from the ground up....

Framing the new kitchen

Then the drywall...

Then the paint...

Then the floor...

And then..drumroll please! 


Our kitchen now...yay! Yes, I didn't tidy, deal with it :p

Justin making dinner, yum!

Louie wants his close-up...

One of my favorite things about our kitchen is the lighting.  Recessed, in-cabinet, and under-cabinet lighting...the whole she-bang :)

ps...notice the fancy blinds on our big kitchen window. We got those professionally installed. I'll probably be doing a post about all the window treatments in our house sometime in the future (I hope!).

And the piece de resistance! The fridge--which I loved and picked! Love the bottom freezer.  No more frozen meats dropping on my foot. That's never happened to you?

C'est fini! (French for "It's finished!") For now... :)

The Finishing Touches

Hello everybody. Just going through my backlog of half finished posts trying to finish blog posts that I have started. But you wouldn't expect anything less than late from me, would you? My hope that is when we look back at this year, each and every story (with the help of post-dating) will fall in to place. Meaning, if Mr. Futureman were to read my blog, he would see a cohesive story, not my sporadic, backdated mess...Hehehe...anyway, at this point you know that we are already moved in. But there is still a ton that needs to be done around the house before the contractors can fully be out of our hair.

Like the mini-radiator in our kitchen. Since the renovation increased the size of the kitchen footprint (over a foot) we needed an additional heat source to accommodate the bigger space.



Also we replaced those ugly, old white ceiling fans our bedroom and living room with nicer looking dark wood fans. (Thanks Javi for installation help!)

 

With our cabinets fully installed, I had to pick out the hardware for the cabinets and drawers. I wanted to keep it simple so I went with brushed stainless steel handles and knobs. They're from the Home Depot.

But with all of these little touches inching us closer to completion, of course there had to be a huge problem brewing, or in this case...boiling...

Exhibit A...grodie (is that how you spell it?) pipe from our boiler.

That is our copper pipe coming out of our boiler.  Apparently the previous owners did not properly seal the pipes, which lead to this "rust/corrosion".  Our contractor discovered it when his workers were installing the small radiator in the kitchen (they needed to drain the boiler when installing the new radiator).  This is the reason why our basement always seems to have some wet look and smell to it, especially near the boiler.  Our contractor is looking at the price of materials to fix the pipe, but because of the stage of the corrosion, the only remedy is to replace that section of the pipe. Yup, this is yet another thing that will have to get fixed.

Week 18: Kitchen Cabinets are In

Today our kitchen cabinets were installed. As I mentioned in a previous post I boldly chose to go with cabinets with windows (to show off our collection of coordinating shamrock green Fiestaware of course!) and I think they look great! Our contractor is installing both cabinet and under cabinet lighting.

When looking from the dining room, these are the cabinets on the left side of the kitchen. You can see the space where the microwave will go.

These are the cabinets on the right side of the kitchen. We will use the large cabinet on the right as our pantry.

This is the cabinet area on the left side of the fridge. Our contractor put that coaxial cable there in case we wanted to mount a TV there in the future. Nice idea, but I don't think we'll be using it.

 

Week 17: Granite Planet

Since we are on the home stretch of the kitchen renovation, the time had come to select the countertops. I'm not one for being trendy nor caring too much about countertops.  I just wanted them to look good. I didn't really care about what material they were going to be either. I really liked the look of marble, however, it is expensive and hard to take care of because it stains. Justin wasn't too keen on silestone (manufactured material) so by process of elimination, we chose granite. Our contractor sent us a couple of granite selections to choose from.

I thought this selection (while nice) looked a little too generic.

I really liked this one because it had a nice marble look to it (excuse our contractor's reflection in the slab, lol).

This one reminded me of blood in water on rocks--gruesome, huh?

This one reminded me of a candy bar, I'm getting hungry just looking at it, ha!

From the research I've found on design blogs and such, dark cabinets look best when paired with lighter colored countertops because they really brighten the space. Because I like the dark/light combo, I really liked granite sample #2.  That's what we picked but wait until you see what we ended up with... J

Week 14: Appliance Selection

Hello everyone! Our kitchen appliances came in today! HH Gregg was advertising a fabulous sale on a GE suite (refrigerator, stove, microwave, and dishwasher) so we decided to go in and check it out. Unfortunately, the fridge included in the sale did not have an outside ice and water dispenser, so that was pretty much a deal breaker for us.

However, upon talking to the salesman on-site, he told us that we could pretty much make our own package of appliances to create our own deal, how cool is that? So...in our custom designed GE suite we were able to get the fridge with the ice/water dispenser, the gas stove (which surprisingly cost as much as the electric), the over-the-range microwave, and the upgraded dishwasher with the stainless steel tub for...drumroll please...under $3000! I thought that was a great deal considering the Samsung fridge that I originally had been drooling over cost the same amount! Although, I like the fancy things in life, this girl has gotta be practical, especially when it comes to kitchen appliances. After all, Justin  will be using them the most, not me! :)

Anyway, the appliances were delivered to our house shorly thereafter. Here is the dishwasher. Since I am the one that does the dishes, the is defnitely one appliance that I'll be using. To demonstrate its quietness the saleman put his cell phone in the floor model dishwasher and let it ring. I swear, I couldn't hear a thing! Not like I was ever bothered by a noisy dishwasher, but the fact that it was so quiet was pretty cool!

Here is the stove. We got a gas stove because we have gas lines for it (It's not like we switched from electric or anything). We opted for the four burner top, as opposed to the five burner, because we didn't really see ourselves using all five burners at the same time. For just the two us and the way we cook, four burners would be more than enough.

Lastly, is the fridge! I really wanted a fridge with the freezer on the bottom.  In the past, many frozen food items have fallen on me in both my parent's side-by-side fridge as well as Justin's former apartment's top freezer. For both my sanity and my toes, a freezer drawer was a must have. For Justin and the gallons of water he drinks, the water dispenser on the outside was a must for him.

Note: There are no pics of the over-the-range microwave because it was still in the box.

Update: So far we are loving our new appliances. However, one of  gas burners on our cooktop isn't working (is that an installation issue?) and the plastic area over ice/water button on our fridge has already started bubbling. Boo hiss! Probably due to overuse. In the future, I would opt for SEPARATE ice and water buttons. No big deal, but aesthetically it doesn't look too hot.