Foyer Transformation

The roof, the roof, the roof is on FOYER !!!

So one day I built a shelf... I'm not sure what happened after that but for the past few years I've been tearing my house apart and remodeling everything I could. Usually starting with the parts that bothered my wife the most. I have come up with a triage system for managing project necessity based on the severity and magnitude of complaints received by be from my family.

One of these projects was the foyer. Check it out!!!

BEFORE

  

AFTER

KABOOM!! right? Here are some shots of the work.

Carpet and tile coming out a little floor leveling compound in there too.

New Sill

Some wood and MDF.

Adding the crown.

Some paint.

Archway Buildup

The house has some nice big openings from room to room downstairs. The ceilings are 10ft tall and the tops of the arches are 8ft so I wanted to make the one from the foyer to the living room BIG and beautiful since it's the first thing you see when you walk in the front door. 

Door trim is built up the same way as the archway, baseboards are 1x6's with a basecap on top and a small shoe on bottom. The door is the same just painted dark grey. 

Crown moulding is a three piece build up. Baseboard on bottom, crown in middle and 1x4 on top. 

Porch Rebuild

One of the things my city does really well besides charging awesomely high taxes is encouraging neighborhood beautification projects. It is a program that works probably because it actually has nothing at all to do with city government. It is a grant opportunity offered to neighborhood on a block by block basis where if you get a certain number of people to participate, they will match any costs up to $1000. You really can't go wrong with this! So last year we took advantage of the Oswego Renaissance Grant and rebuilt our porch.

Here is how it went......

Before and After

After the old porch was removed, 6 x 6's were used for the main support columns.

Here it is before the really fun stuff happened!!

I used all pressure treated boards for the decking and skirting.

Same view before and after....

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Column Construction

So normally I work indoors doing finish carpentry and mouldings so working with pressure treated was a bit different. I know I wanted to have some good looking coulmns but didn't want them to separate and look like crap overtime as the wood dried out and shifted over time. Mainly what that meant for me was to make sure all my trim pieces fit super tight and I didn't have any mite angles on the pressure treated parts. The trim is all pvc moulding and wont change so I did have mitre joints on those. 

You can see the build up here. 

Now here they are with the PVC trim.

These were constructed basically the same way but using 6 x 6 anchors drilled into the concrete then the outer parts built up over that. 

Railing Construction

I really didn't want to add railings at all but since kids fall off things I guess I had to. So I thought a lot about what I wanted to do on design. I really liked the sawn baluster look but I wanted to make them myself and I wanted them to be strong and pressure treated. So heres what I came up with...

Yes it was a tedious job but Sebastian approved and I'm really happy with the results. The way I made the railings was to rip the deck boards into 1 1/2" strips then cut all the little triangle pieces one by one. I secured everything with adhesive and stainless steel brad nails for the small pieces and deck screws through the top of the 2 x 4's straight down into each vertical style for added strength. Then by putting the deck bard on the top as the hand rail it hid all the screws and looks super clean. The railings are constructed with a 2 x 4 top and bottom, and a 5/4 deck board as the top so it's nice and fat. Then there was some trim added to that. 

I will be painting it this summer!

Master Bedroom Addition

Update 9-25-17
Floor and Fixtures 

6-5-17

Over the weekend I added the trim to the bathroom door and painted. The Parts of the door trim are similar to the pillasters on the sliding door. They are recessed and built by using 3/4" MDF and panel moulding. The top portion was built using pine on and using a method on the table saw of making a raised panel similar to a cabinet door. There is crown moulding on the top and some smaller panel moulding under that too.

Here it is in place before being primed.

I filled and primed it off the door so I could really do a good job getting into all the tight spots while filling and priming. 

I added an appilique in the center after it was installed. I painted it separately and then attached it. It's much easier than trying to paint while in place. 

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So on this project we are working on a newly constructed master bedroom addition that is 13'X32' with a vaulted ceiling. We are matching the existing trim style in the house which is a Victorian / Crafstman style throughout.

The first project was installing the three piece flying crown buildup along the top of the wall. There was also the window which was trimmed out using the same two moulding profiles as the crown.

For the three pieces of crown I used a common baseboad for the bottom which is available at any big box lumber yard, a common crown profile for the middle piece and  a cove profile for the top.

The window trim is made up of the same but with a smaller crown under the sill. I would have used the same crown as on top but to keep it tighter to the wall the smaller one worked better.

Here it is after being primed. At this point the ceiling, walls and trim are still all just primed. 

Now here it is with some paint before the wall has any color on it.

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This is the trim around the sliding door. I built some raised panel pilasters for the sides and used the same crown with the cove on top. The crown molding shown in this picture is before the primer was on that's why the cove on top still shows the wood color. The baseboard a crown are MDF and the cove is pine. 

Here it is with some paint