The cabinets I’m building are traditional face frame cabinets that will be painted white. The panels will be flat with an applied moulding which is actually the same layout as all the panels in the original wainscoting in the house. For the cases I’m using 3/4″ one side pre-finished birch plywood, and for the face frames I’m using rough cut 4/4 Poplar. Poplar is cheap, nice to work, strong, and paints up great. Read More
Category Archives: Finishing
Over the past 110 years the picture rails in our living room have been removed and reinstalled many times as new layers of wallpaper were added. The coped ends were pretty damaged, and while I did save all the original picture rails I decided that it’d be much easier to just replace them. Finding a similar moulding profile in quarter sawn Fir wasn’t difficult, but I was nervous about trying to match the original dark stain.
This was my second tiling project, and I found it a bit more finicky than my first one which was the tub surround. The tiles are unglazed porcelain: 3/4″ squares for the border and 1″ hex for the field. They come in 10 5/8″ x 9 1/2″ sheets which are held together by a plastic sheet which gets peeled off after the tiles have set. There was a fair amount of cutting and trimming to get everything line up, especially where the field tile meets the border. Because the tiles were too small to use with an uncoupling membrane like Schulter Ditra I opted to use a waterproofing membrane in combination with fibreglass mesh to minimize issues if the concrete subfloor were to develop cracks in the future. I rolled Mapei HPG directly onto the Read More
I’ve now got the crown moulding and picture rail all finished up and have installed the bathroom fan and lighting. As I work my way down the room I’m now working on the built-in medicine cabinet and will soon start on the wainscotting and tiling the tub surround! Read More
There is still another coat of paint and a few touch-ups remaining, but so far I’m really happy with how they’ve turned out:
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