This project has taken much longer to complete than anyone might have imagined.  However it is done and it looks great.

I left off in our last episode with new veneer being ordered with a thin PVC backing to prevent it from shrinking and expanding.  I mistakenly thought both the supplier and the contractor would move mountains to get the veneer to me ASAP.  A couple weeks went buy and no info was comming my way so I called the contractor.  He said the product was being shipped directly to us and he thought I was calling to tell him it was there.

My wife and I head North for the summer and we were concerned that it might not get done before we left.  Then just in time the new PVC back veneer showed up.  I opened the large boxes and found the dark pieces that were to go on the master and guest baths didn’t look like a large piece of wood that matched the rest of the cabinet doors, rather it looked like the planks of a hardwood floor stained the color of our cabinets.

The contractor came right over when I called him with this info.  He said he ordered a roll cut and they sent something different.  The contractor said he would see if he could find any material in the area since they had also sent stain.

By now we had ran out of time and headed north for the summer.  I told the contractor I was withholding $400 from the project payout so that I could get the job done if he lost interest.  Suddenly time wasn’t a factor and our work took a backseat to other work.  We made a trip down a month and a half later and some of the veneer that was bad had been torn off, I assume to see how hard it was going to be to remove.  Again I called the contractor who was appologetic, but not much had been done.

 The contractor called us after another month and was ready to complete the project.  This was good news to me because enough time has passed that it would have been easy to walk away from the project.  We made arrangements with a friend to let the contractor in the house, which he did on several occasions.

The contractor emailed me to let me know the project was complete and for all our trouble he was going to write off the $400 and so our account paid in full.  I was pleased the project was complete according to the contractor but I wanted to see the results before I jumped up and down.

Another month passed and we finally got down to see the work.  The first thing I noticed when I walked into the house was a note from the contractor thanking us for our patience along with a gift card to a restaurant.

I looked at all the work and it did look very good, much better than we imagined.  

Master Bath Cabinets & Mirror (notice legs added to look more furniture-like)

Pool Bath

Nautica Bath

Guest Bath & Mirror

Over-all the project turned out stunning and while the project had unforseen problems that extended the project way beyond what even the most pessimistic buildier might have anticipated, I have to hand it to my contractor for sticking with the job until it’s completion.  My contractor was About Face Cabinets in Tampa Florida.  In another year we will likely be ready to reface our kitchen cabinets and we will call About Face again because of the quality of their work and our working relationship throught some trying times.

Before I get too much further I should show you the cabinets that we included to have refaced and granite counter tops installed.

 Master Bath 1 of 2

Master Bath 2 of 2

Pool Bath

Guest Room Bath

Nautica Bath

Excuse the peachy color, I shot these with with my cell phone and the color wasn’t great.

Recapping briefly I developed a description of the project, asked contractors for pricing and got an array of prices.  The array of prices is the scary part of this project.  If I received four prices and they we all within a couple hundred dollars of each other, I would give the project to the one I felt the most comfortable with and life would go on.  But in this case one contractor was half the price of the big boys in town.  After some checking with great references I gave the project to the low contractor and decided to include his granite price and have the project done all at once.

We had a very specific schedule we were working with.  The holidays were coming up and we scheduled to go North to see family and planned on returning after the New Year.  Shortly after the New Year we had guest coming down so we wanted the project done before they arrived.  A good long lead time and even if the project took a couple weeks we were good with the schedule (contractor estimated 2 days).

The contractor kept me informed via email the with the progress of the order and we picked a day to begin.

The granite people were first.  I was shocked when I walked into the first bath room (the pool bath) to see the very large miror sitting in the hallway.  I never imagined they would remove the mirrors.  The granite went in without much trouble however on piece of granite didn’t look like the piece we selected.  Our contractor said it was cold and that it would lighten as it warmed.  Over the next several days we watched it get lighter but not quite as light as we had wanted.

With the granite in, the contractor began sanding on the side panels and the cabinet box to rough up the surface so the veneer could be attached with glued.  The veneer looked great!  The contractor had pre-fitted the new cabinet doors with their hinges and began installing them. 
Then the first snag.  The contractor missed the dimension on one of the drawers and the door face was way too small.  Fortunately it was in the master bath so our guest would not see it.  The contractor told me one package of the frames were broken on the end when they were shiped and he would not have enough to complete the frames.  Of course the frame that was damaged was for the guest bath.

I assumed the contractor would run down to the lumber yard get some more material, stain it, cut it…crisis over.  Not the case.  The stain, wood and finish were all corridinated through his Canadian supplier so the final project would all match flawlessly.  So the contractor ordered the new door and more frame material to match the cabinets.

Now we had a couple weeks to wait.  After a couple days the veneer on the side panels of the cabinets began to ripple like aq wavy potato chip.  The contractor came right over to look at the veneer and took photos to send to his supplier.  Turns out it had been really cold in Florida for several weeks.  The veneer sat in his trailer over night, in the cold, and when it was installed the wood expanded and seperated from it’s paper backing.  The supplier agreed to send veneer with a pheonolic backing to eliminate this problem.

This brings up a very important issue for any work involving wood.  Always let the wood sit in the space it’s going to be installed in at least 24 hours so that it can acclimate to the temperature and relative humidity.  A flooring project maybe a couple days just to be safe.

So that’s were we are now.  The next installment should show the completed project.

I’m about midway through a cabinet refacing project and I can tell that this is going to take several intallments to discuss.  I’ll include some photos of the work as we go along.  I’m optimistic the project is going to turn out well but an old friend of mine once told me the definition of an optimist was “someone without much experience”.  Basically the more you know the more you know that can go wrong.

In a former life I had a contracting company and an engineering company, so my approach echoed my years of experience in the construction fields.  I first developed a description of the project incorporating as much detail as I could.  At the very least it included which cabinets were going to be refaced.  And in my case I want some wood mirror frames changed out to matched the new cabinet doors and to update the cabinets in two room we wanted to add legs to the cabinets to make them look more like furniture.

I listed when I wanted the project to begin, requested desired deposit amounts, and asked for a breakdown of cost (as much as they would provide).  Breakdowns describe steps or pieces of the construction that if you want to change or delete at a later date the breakdown will give you cost.  The rule of thumb I always assumed was that in a deduct (where you delete something from a project) you got half of the value.  And in an add you paid twice the value.  If you think you might want additional work or products supplied get pricing for those adds up front.  You’ll see why as my saga unfolds.

So with my description of work, request for references, request for pricing breakdown and any other parameters that I want to define, like timeframe, all written down to provide each contractor the same information to base there bid, I called six contractors that I found in the phonebook and on the internet.

All six needed to visit the house to look at the work in order to give me a price based on the condition they were going to be installed in.  Two of the six wanted me to measure the cabinets and were going to give me a ballpark price over the phone.  I thanked them for there time and declined their offer.  It wasn’t like they were all busy in the first part of 2010 with the economy in the dumper.

The first and the largest cabinet refacing/kitchen/bath remodeler showed up looked at my project description, spent some time measuring cabinets, rolled out his samples, gave me one of their elaborate brochures, ran his calculator for a while and then took a piece of letterhead out and wrote a number down $9,500 and then for emphasis he circled the number.  I asked for my breakdown information, he said he would provide it after we enter a contract.  This wasn’t the info I requested and the price…I really didn’t know if that was a good price or not, but I did know that if it was, I wouldn’t be doing this project now.

The next contractor did the same general routine but this time gave me some breakdown for each of the bathrooms we were going to do.  I was suprised that each of these two contractors could give me pricing right then and there because some of the things like the mirror frames was not part of a typical project.  Nonetheless this contractor’s price was $7,900.  A full $1,600 cheaper then the first contractor.

The third contractor came collected information and said he would email his bid.

And the last contractor did the same thing, took information, showed us his samples and said he would get back to us.  He specifically said he would have to contact his supplier regarding the mirror frames and the legs which were unusual.  He also wanted me to have his list of references so I could talk with them prior to getting his pricing.  I’m not going to spend any time checking references until I know if this contractor has provided a bid that I’m interest in.

The third contractor after several calls proding him to give me a price, quote me a price over the phone that was $6,950.  This was getting down around the $5,000 price that I thought it might be.

The last contractor stalled me even longer telling me that his supplier from Canada was not getting back to him.  He added that while he was frustrated the products he gets from them are both excellent quality and very competitive.  After another week he came back to me with a price $2,000 cheaper than the third contractor, with a very complete description of work, with the breakdowns I had requested.  How could this be?  I called all the references he provided (about 25) and most not only gave him a good references most sounded like they wanted to adopt him.  I checked more with the Better Business Bureau.  I checked for his prior business…all checked out to be believable.

Remember when I said to ask for pricing for possible adds to the project?  We asked for pricing on granite countertops and he had a good number for that.  All total the contract was agreed to for about the same price as the third contractor, including the granite.  Less than most of the numbers I received for cabinet refacing alone.  This contractor also wanted the least amount up front.  If the project turns out good I’ll tell you who he is, but for now I’ll call him contractor 4.

That’s the end of part 1, I’ll write the second part tomorrow.

Beyond the normal thought of recycle and reuse should be refurbished and recertified.   So much energy is employed in the manufacture and distribution of products which is rarely considered when a product is purchased.   Much energy can be saved by purchasing a product already manufactured, omitting the need to manufacture more.

I frequently use sites like www.ecost.com , www.overstock.com , www.refurbdepot.com to see what is available when I’m looking for a product.  My experience is that manufacturers with recognizable names, that I see advertising on TV, thouroughly inspect products returned to them for quality control.  Repairs are made and the entire use of the product is tested for operation.  Typically if products have been returned for other reasons, those problems are also repaired at the same time.  So in most cases products that are offered as refurbished have been tested much more thouroughly than products rolling off an assembly line.  

And the best news is that you can save a lot of money buying a like-new product with as good or better chance of operating satisfactorily over the life of the product.

Electronics are one of the best places to look at recertified products.  I practice what I preach.  I have a Denon amplifier, Panasonic Blu-Ray player, and Dyson vacuum.  The amp and the vacuum were purchased for about 50% of their cost a most stores and the Blu-Ray player was 75% of the cost of advertised specials I’ve seen for the exact same product.

Knock on wood, we’ve had no problem with any of these products.  However if you have a concern, warranty extensions are available from companies specializing in refurbished products.  Typically to add a years warranty will cost 10% of the discounted purchase price.

 The best tool in your arsenal to conserve energy and cost is your computer and the internet.  Shop around, compare without impulse buying, without consuming gasoline, employing the internet to research and the result might be a great quality product for a lot less than you thought.

I wrote in a past article that we had a new puppy and that I was sure I would need to find out how to repair pet damage on furniture.  Well our puppy is getting past that age of eating everything without eating any our our furniture, yes I’m bragging.  However I felt compelled to research and write this article since past pets had created extensive damage to my furniture.

I wasn’t suprised  that there wasn’t much information out there regarding repairing partially damaged furniture.  I talked with some re-upholstery companies who seemed to be the best source of information.  Their advice dealt with a hole chewed  or clawed badly  fabric covering the sofa or chair.  Universally they suggested that extra fabric was abundant on nearly all pieces of upholstered furniture.  One exception is seat cushions which I’ve covered in a prior article.  Sofas usually have cushions of like material that can be used to repair damaged locations.  One even told me that a client wanted a pillow permanently attached to her sofa, covering an area that was eaten by her very large dog.  I thought this was a very easy way to cover damage in the back cushion or back part of a seat cushion.  Likewise the back of sofas will nearly always have material that can be used.

If a sofa rest against a wall, salvaged material frolm the back will near be seen.  A complementary material can be inset into the rear of the sofa to cover the area removed.  If the material covering an arm is destroyed, material from the back will likely be able to recover the entire arm.  The old arm fabric makes a perfect template for constructing the new cover.

I won’t pretend that I’m a skilled upholsterer or that I can even sew, but with todays products and the construction of today’s furniture I feel most repairs can be made by the do it yourself crowd.  The fabric on most arms is streched over foam material and stapled in place.  The face and side materials of an arm typically have a sewn seam and occasionally some cord (or pipping material) to highlight a seam.   Or a covering plate of material is used to conceal streched material beneath the plate.  Again using the old material as a template it is not difficult to recreate the pattern with the salvaged material.

In nearly all cases the backs of upholstered furniture provides an abundant source of nearly unused, perfectly matching material for you repair.  Either covering the entire back or a portion of the back with a complimentary fabric gives you a one of a kind piece of furniture.

Damage to wood legs an arms falls under one of three categories; destroyed beyond all recognition, disfigured, and marked up with teeth or claw marks.  Absent a historic claw foot on a piece of furniture most damage that is severe can be repaired by replacing the leg with a replica of the leg.  Furniture legs almost always come in two’s or more and even a turned legs can be used recreated using another leg as a template.

If the damage isn’t too bad, on short legs I would do what I could to disguise the damage but then I would leave it alone.  On taller legs like a dining room chair I would use wood filler, sand and stain to match.  For minor damage read the article on using touch up pens.

Not until I decided to write this article had I thought how we had been practicing this in our own home.

We didn’t repurpose items so much for conservation as we did because we liked the design of an item. 

Just in the last year I can think of five places where we repurposed objects starting with a lazy susan that came with a new patio set we purchased.  Since the patio set was going to be located on our lanai we didn’t need an umbrella and therefore we didn’t need a lazy susan.  The lazy susan was about two feet in diameter with a unique Celtic knot pattern and of course a hole for the umbrella in the middle. 

We had been searching for art to put in our master bathroom without much luck.   The lazy susan mounted on the wall in our bathroom clearly looks like a one of a kind piece of art.  It went great with other objects we had placed in the bathroom and best of all it cost us nothing.

In our midwest home we have very high sloping ceilings.  In the familyroom we had been searching for an object to put on the walls that would not be so weighty as the very large, over-sized mirror we had just removed.  Here we clearly made an effort to look at many options in an effort to get exactly what we wanted.   Ultimately we ended up using a screen we had stored in our basement.  The screen looks like woven sticks or reeds in each section.  We disassembled the screen and used two of the three panels mounted horizontally (one over the other with a space between) to visually cover a large section of the wall.  It worked great, with it’s see through design the wall color was visible in the background.  We didn’t think it was perfect because it didn’t show off the height of the ceilings and finally place a wire basket above and to one end of the screens and it looks great,  almost like a piece of modern art.

The mirror we took down was so large it really didn’t go in any other room in the house, but a large piece of it did go in my workout room in the basement and gave it some class which it needed badly.  Those healthclubs have nothing over us.

If you watch any of the decorating shows on HGTV you will see one of their favorite ways to make a space feel larger is mirrors.  And one uses of mirrors is to back bookshelves.  The remainder of the large mirror removed from our familyroom was used to back a book shelve in a guess bedroom.  Remember large bathroom mirrors can be cut to size and repurposed for this use without much effort.

In a very similar vein we have repurposed serving trays, wallpaper, tile samples, and fabric pieces to make our own unique wall hangings.  Serving trays can be used after attaching a mounting wire or hook to the back.  We have a tray we purchased in Spain that had the exact colors we need for a bedroom.  And another tray collected from our travels we used in a plate rack as decoration in our familyroom.  The plate rack works great because we can press the serving tray into action anytime we need it.  Framing a piece of tile or wallpaper is another way to take a color or pattern you liked and incorporate it into your house.

All of these ideas were free or very low cost.  All created one of a kind pieces of art or furnishings.  And all are more enjoyable to look at everyday because we came up with this repurposing of these objects.

Most people think living truly green is an expensive proposition.  Quite the contrary, simple steps will conserve more energy than the person who goes out and purchases some energy gizmo and thinks they are living truly green.  The following are a few steps that can be easily done, saving energy and consequently the enviroment.

Plan your trips!  Unles you currently live many miles from a city and know that planning your trips is imperative, then you are wasting both time and energy by not planning your trips.  The person who lives in the country knows that it is a long way into town, one that they won’t be making every day.  So to save gas and the time it takes to drive that long distance into town they plan.  They schedule when they are going, where they are going (likely in some logical sequence), and they make a list to make sure they get everything so they don’t have to make another trip.

The closer you live to grocery stores, department and specialty stores the more likely you are to make numerous trips.  It seems like common sense that if it’s not too far you could make more trips and not use as much gas/energy as the person who lives in the country.  Many studies say not so.  In fact you are more lkely to use the same or more.  Of course this is easy to deal with by setting a day each week for grocery shopping, developing a menu with a list of items required to prepare the menu and replenish household consumables.  Similarily set a day for shopping for those other items.  Make a list and establish a logical route.  Aside from saving far more gas then you can imagine and saving several hours of time throughout a week you will find another non-energy bonus, you will save money.  When you make several trips to the store you rarely know how much money you are spending and you likely don’t go through your coupons when you are only going after a couple items.  Knowing what you are spending and using coupons is a powerful tool to save your dollars.

Next on your list of living green is to take those canvas bags with you whenever you shop which I might add is much easier to remember when you are making a planned trip.  Plastic bags in our landfills represent huge volumes of waste that don’t deteriorate for decades.  Numerous studies have estimated volumes and the life of a plastic bag in a landfill, all of which have different values quoted,  most intelligent people don’t dispute they are a bad thing.  I leave my canvas bags in the car and try to remember to take them into anywhere that I am shopping.  I occasionally forget and will be standing in line when I remember, that’s when I stop and go get the bags or ask someone to get them for me.  The enviromental savings are obvious and here again incorporating the canvas bags as part of your planned trip further solidifies this living green excersize.

Next is setting thermostat settings at reasonable levels.  Reasonable levels vary in different parts of the country for obvious and some not so obvious reasons.  Obviously when you live near a large body of water, water temperature helps regulate temperature and contributes mositure/humidity to the air.  And more obscurely if you live in  areas of constant extremes like Florida or Alaska you’ll find ductwork that delivers air to the house is designed to deal with just those types of extremes and not like a house that has to deal with all four seasons. 

A good example contrast our house in the midwest which is subjected to four seasons of weather.  The ductwork needs to be placed to prove some air high for cooling needs and some air low for heating requirements.  Our midwest home is passive solar and is well built, but in the heat of the summer the thermostat needs to be set on 72 or 73 degrees to be comfortable.  Our Florida home has all the duckwork positioned high in the house to provide cooling (cooling air falls and warm air rises).  76 is very comfortable setting there because the cool air is falling on you.

I hesitate to give you a fixed setting for your house rather use this simple guide.  Don’t turn the thermostat down in the summer and then spend the evening covered with a throw.  Don’t set the thermostat down low and sleep under a sheet, a blanket and a comforter through the night.  In the winter the opposite applies.  Don’t set the thermostat up high during the day and be throwing off blankets through the night because you are too hot.  A good cheap programmable thermostat will cost you $40.  Your return for this investment will be measured in days not months.  Heating and air conditioning was invented to provide you comfort so find the temperature that feels comfortable at different times of the day for both heating and cooling and make your bed to match the season for where you live.

Just these few steps can save you a lot of money and substantially reduce your impact on the enviroment not to mention, make you more efficient with your time and more comfortable in your own home.

Simple concepts, huge benefit!

At recycledfurniture.com decluttering creates an opportunity to sell furniture and buy furniture.  And that’s good for the enviroment and good for you.

 We recently bought a winter home in Florida and everything we bought in Florida was for that specific house.  When we were done we found we had everything we needed and not a lot more to clutter up our lives.  At our other home we have accumulated stuff over more than 25 years in this home and 15 years worth of stuff from older homes.

The more we looked at our clutter the more we became determined to change our enviroment which meant getting rid of a lot of stuff.  If I hadn’t needed something I was saving for twenty years, I likely wasn’t ever going to need that piece of stuff for another twenty.  And even if I needed that exact piece of stuff the very next year I decided I’d rather have the space and buy the purged stuff when I needed it in the quantities I needed and discard the rest in favor of decluttering.

So my rule was simple, if I hadn’t touched or needed the thing I was holding in the last year, it was either discarded or sold.

In the garage my life became very simple.  I knew what I had and where everything was, with the results being clear isles at the side of the cars,  room to store the new giant trash cans required by the city and boxes of great garage sale items other guys would need to clutter up their garage.

The basement was very similar in results lots of great garage sale items and getting rid of some old lawn furniture and ping pong table gave us tons of room we didn’t have.  We even took a shelf we didn’t need in the garage any longer and put it in the basement to help organize our stored items.

But the biggest change that I see every day was in our office.  Old office furniture stemming back from the days of huge computer monitors and desktop computers served to store a lot of unecessary stuff.  These days we have two laptops, a need for file storage and a wanting for more room.

We sold the old computer desk and hutch, the office desk, bookshelves and printer stand.  Once all the clutter was gone we were amazed how big the space was.  And even more amazing was how many of our children noticed one of the walls in the office had tongue and groove oak paneling.  It has been that way for all twenty plus years we have been here.  The clutter was the first thing that caught you eye. 

Now we have two regular desk, a printer stand/file storage and a bookshelve that is both attractive and functional.  And the space still looks large.  Here again I thought I had an idea what was in the office furniture….. I didn’t.  I do now, and I know where everything is. 

I am very careful what I keep these days, I like being decluttered.  The net results was that the sale of furniture and garage sale items yeilded a net gain after purchasing the new furniture.  The new furniture was new to us, looked brand new, but we bought furniture that was previously own and gently used.

A win-win life altering event.