Littlehill Land, LLC

You're probably wondering what's been going on with the remodel of your apartment the last couple of days. The big one is that the rebuild of the cabinets has made its greatest hurdle and is ready for the granite to go on tomorrow (Monday). There's finish work to do, drawer slides to upgrade and so forth, but the structure is all there and functional.

I haven't made a big deal about it because it's sort of an "efficiency" part of the apartment, but c. 200 of the 1200 square feet of the Lower apartment is downstairs, where there's a laundry area and "bonus room". I'd never heard of such a term, but my older sister, Nicky, and little sister, Nancy, watch this real estate reality show that uses it. Apparently, it's a room that is unnecessary or undefined in some way that renters can use for … whatever they need. In the ground plan I've made available on this site, I've called it "Office/Storage". The ceiling's a bit low, and the knotty pine paneling …

Well, Nicky decided that knotty pine is an old and shabby look, which is a view consistent, it seems, with the renter/players in the realty reality show. I really hadn't planned to do anything with that area of the apartment this time around, but Nick took it over. Family is a great thing. When my sisters decided I could use a hand, they both took two days out of their lives to come over and work. The cavalry arrived, and the chosen stand would be made down in the basement. Since I hadn't intended to do a thing down there, but hadn't anticipated having help to do it either, it was a bonus room indeed.

So we could paint over the paneling and be done with it, right? No, dear future renter, that would not be good enough for the likes of you! Paint? What? Do the simple and inexpensive thing? Are you kidding? No, painting over knotty pine is hard to make look good. The knots and swirls that give the lumber its name are hard to sand down, and the result is that the features can still be seen under the paint. No, no trouble or expense is spared for the rooms of your under-200. Over the course of

two days we stripped off all the old varnish inch by inch. We removed all the stuff that removed the varnish inch by inch. We sanded the mostly bare wood with 120 grit inch by inch. We treated the sanded wood inch by inch. We pulled the baseboards and the cove molding and stripped/cleaned/sanded them, and pulled all the nails that held them. Sometime soon we will re-sand the treated wood and stain it with a white-ish translucent coat to make the basement room light and as airy as it can be, while retaining the structure of the pine.

I got a break part of Friday by installing the new faucet for the bathroom, a nice Price-Pfister that my sisters (every busy!) found. Simple, rounded, perfect for the oval Kohler its going on. The old, plastic handled, single-valve Moen was not at all in the style of the room. Did I say installed? Not totally. the valves and water supply lines were ancient, and wouldn't fit the new faucet. That remodeling for you — two steps forward, then a wall. I bought new valves and supply lines for both this sink and the one in the kitchen.