Home Renovations

Linda Castle of Decorated Designs, a frequent video contributor to About Home Renovations, gave us a good piece recently about the importance of thinking outside the box with wainscot.

Wainscot--partial paneling that ends less than halfway to the ceiling--is often beadboard and often white.  That's the norm.

But colored wainscot adds another dimension of character, too:

• You can leave the upper part of the wall neutral, painting the wainscot a darker color, as shown in #3.
• You can stain the wainscot (#4) for a very formal, "gentleman's club" look.
• You can even dispense with the wood altogether and use stone (#2).  Castle recommends that if you decide to use stone, you do so sparingly.

Upper Left: (c) B. Tristan Denyer; All Other Images: (c) About.com

If you want solid color kitchen cabinets, you can paint them.  The wood grain will not show through.

As an example, here is Martha Stewart Mourning Dove Gray.  Make sure you use 100% acrylic, not latex, paint.

If you want kitchen cabinets that have more of a stained wood appearance, kits can help you with that.

This example is from Cabinet Transformations:

See Article:  Painted Kitchen Cabinet Ideas

Images:  (c) Martha Stewart Home (Top); (c) Rustoleum (Bottom).

Review of the book Sabrina Soto Home Design.

Image:  (c) John Wiley & Sons

Retro doorbells range in period from Victorian to Mid-Century Modern, with numerous periods in-between (Deco, Art Nouveau, Craftsman, etc.).

I find it interesting that you can have an electrical, back-lit, LED Victorian doorbell.  But whatever.  It's all about the look.

The "Press Here" bells (#7) are everywhere and inexpensive.

The plain, round doorbell found in #1:  I've featured the pricey one from Rejuvenation, but you can find cheaper elsewhere.

Starburst (#2):  you have to buy at Rejuvenation.

Most are not historically accurate.  For that, you'll need to spend time on eBay and other auction sites for doorbells like the amazing Deco doorbell shown in #8.

Not enough can be written about home offices:  they're the underdog of home remodeling.

While they do give you a nice tax deduction, home offices get lousy marks when it comes to property resale value.  Few home builders properly design home offices for anything other than very high-end homes.

So, that's why so many homes get extensively remodeled with the office in mind.  Offices get squeezed into closets, behind doors, under stairs, onto book shelves, and entire bedrooms.  You have to be inventive to find a place to work in relative quiet.  Our article, linked above, displays the creativity of a noted home designer, a big-box home design warehouse, and a home improvement magazine.

Images:  Images 1 and 2: (c) Stephen Saint-Onge; Image 3: (c) IKEA; Image 4: (c) The Family Handyman

Here is a list of common types of home additions:

1. "The" Addition:  No other thing to call it.  They range from 500 sq. ft. up to whatever your heart desires.
2. The Bumpout:  A micro-addition that enhances an existing room.
3. The Sunroom:  Typically pre-fabricated aluminum structures sold as kits.
4. The Conservatory:  Like a sun room, but more for growing plants.
5. The Garage Conversion:  A car garage whose door has been sealed off and the inside turned into a liveable space.

Shown here is a conservatory from Pioneer Craftsmen.  Image (c) Pioneer Craftsmen

Foam sheathing isn't used much in home remodeling, though it should be.

As of only a few years ago, wood-only sheathing was installed on 3/4 of all new homes.  For remodels, that number was far less.

Foam sheathing ranges from:

• The Low:  Thin sheathing that installs directly onto existing wood sheathing.  Its R-value is negligible, but it is effective at blocking air and water infiltration.  All the way up to...
• The High:  Thick, one-inch structural sheathing that installs directly onto the studs (no wood sheathing needed) and with an R-value of 5.  That's the sheathing you see in the picture above, Styrofoam brand from Dow Chemical.

Image:  (c)  Dow

Not far.

When you build a bumpout--a micro-addition to your house--you can typically either rest it on a foundation or cantilever it.

Cantilevering means to extend the bumpout into thin air.  No support posts (though this is an option, too).  It's an elegant look.

But it also limits how far you can extend the bumpout.

Image: (c) Lee Wallender; Licensed to About.com

Within the world of home additions, it's considered a midget, a pretender, a shadow of the real thing.  It's called a bump out, and definitions of it vary.

Some say that the bump out is just a few feet jutting out to add space to an existing room.  Others say that a bump out can be a full room itself.  I tend to go with the former.

It's wrong to think that the bump out will be cheaper, on a foot-to-foot basis, than a full addition.  Usually, it's more.  But because you're laying down less square footage, it's cheaper.  Got that?

It's a kitchen nudged out to make space for a dining room.  It's bathroom opened up just a hair more for that big whirlpool tub.  It's that window seat with books.

It's a bump out.

Copyright Shutterstock via Black & Decker The Complete Guide to Room Additions

Yes sir, an article about how to scrape paint.  What has the world come to?  I almost didn't write this article for fear of the public ridicule I would have to endure.

But I got over it.

Paint scraping is a tricky project.  You can't scrape an entire house--crazy.  So you work with what you've got.

But where does the bad paint end and good paint pick up?  It's not always so obvious.  You think you've got an area contained, and then you twist the scraper in a slightly different angle, and BANG!  Paint starts pouring down like snow in Buffalo in winter.

Image:  (c) Lee Wallender; Licensed to About.com