Fall ORC Week 2

Here we are, another week down and we are clipping right on pace. Mike is at the point where he remembers how much he hates projects and wishes he didn’t agree to doing this. Ironically this project was his idea. I merely suggested using it for the ORC.

That’s ok. He’ll be happy when it’s reveal day.

This week I was able to get all of the cabinet doors and drawers that we are re-using painted and put back in place. I lightly sanded all of them. Then primed, then sanded, then painted. If you’d like a full tutorial on how I usually paint cabinets, check it out here (For those who’ve read it know that I don’t usually sand them – I use liquid deglosser). I had to fill and sand all of the handle holes so it just made sense to sand the whole door/drawer front.

I also painted them all by hand. Not sure why except that I just didn’t feel like setting up a spray booth. The finish came out great-so no loss there (except time. lots and lots of time).

In between paint drying I added marble contact paper over the old counters that we aren’t replacing (yet). I used my hair dryer to “shrink wrap” it around the curved edges.

Mike took apart the heating duct work in the front room and installed the new kitchen base cabinet frames, then he re-installed the duct work through the toe kick area of the new bases. I know I’m kinda glazing over that but here’s the details: the ducting used to go through the old base cabinets so that even though they were standard height cabinets, they only had about 25″ of open space. They were sitting on a platform and the ducting ran through false bottoms on the cabinets. I wish I had a picture to explain. But basically, if you look at this picture you will see the heater and some of the ducting coming from it. The platform the cabinets sat on was high enough to clear the heater…instead of just raising the one bottom on the cook-top cabinet they raised all the bottoms.

Have I lost you yet?

After Mike re-did the duct work he moved on to the flooring on the slide. And here is where I mention to him that other RV owners had to install a 1/4″ underlayment to raise it over the slide (but I’m not 100% sure why). I think it’s just to cover some of the slide hardware. He says we don’t need it and he’ll just let the hardware stay exposed since the couch will be resting over it anyways. I go along with it-because he makes perfect sense and I happily return to the casita to paint some more doors content with the progress we are making. Fast forward to a few days when he is almost done with the flooring in the motorhome and attempts to bring the slide in that the couch is resting on-oh did I mention we put together the couches? I’ll get back to those later. So, Mike is attempting to bring in the slide and he hears a horrible scratching. Turns out, the way that the slide comes in is pretty flat at first before it begins to raise and the slide hardware is scratching the new floor. There is a reason now for the underlayment: to raise the slide floor above the slide hardware and cantilever it over the area where the slide comes in flat – since flooring cannot be installed in this area (well carpet could. But who wants carpet?) See, so the underlayment hangs about 4″ OVER the slide hardware into the cabin. This hides the hardware and the blank area of flooring that has to stay blank because the slide comes in flat at first. So Mike had to un-install all of the flooring on the slide, put down an underlayment) he ended up doing 1/4″ to the hardware then 1/2″ over the whole area and cantilevered over. The flooring btw is Nucore vinyl plank in Driftwood bought at Floor and Decor.

Whew. I’m sure I’ve bored you enough.

If you’re still reading at this point you win the gold star of appreciation.

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There it is.

Back to the couches. We bought two Vimle sofas from Ikea. They both have queen pull out mattresses.

I know to some this may seem weird, but to us and our sleeping needs (four kids and can’t convert anything to bunks because we rent this out to people who don’t have kids) this made the most sense. Funny thing, we bought it and weren’t sure if it would work. We knew the dimensions were good. But, Ikea doesn’t give any information on the website about linking two of the pullout sofa’s together. They also don’t allow it to be done with their online sofa planner. I’m guessing they just didn’t imagine anyone would want to do this. Well Ikea, here are those weirdos. I can assure you, they attach together just like they would if they were the regular Vimle sofas.

These sofas are comfortable, deep and well thought out (as usual Ikea). When you pull out the mattress (which again is surprisingly the most comfortable sofa mattress ever) there is a net between the mattress and the frame to keep stuff from falling into the sofa abyss. If you would have seen the amount of gross junk (underwear included-not belonging to any of us) from the old couches you would understand how amazing that net is for us.

Which brings me to my tasks for next week. Build the fireplace surround. Continue to touch up paint and add trim where needed. Build new cornices to hide blinds. Continue to work behind the scenes sourcing kitchen countertop/kitchen table/lighting/blinds/etc. Mike needs to finish the flooring and start working on the shower upgrades. Everything that we ordered for the bathroom shower has mostly arrived. The only thing missing is the shower pan and that is supposed to show up tomorrow.

I also received word that our SemiHandmade cabinet doors should ship out in the next week. I may be making a trip to Ikea in the next couple of days to get the drawers and hinges we need to complete the kitchen.

Thank you for taking the time to read through all that mumbo jumbo. And, if you happen to click on the Amazon link and buy something I do make a small commission at no extra charge to you.

As always, please feel free to head on over to the official One Room Challenge blog and read how the other 350 designers are doing. 🙂