Posts By John Petersik

A newly tiled floor in a new room of the house is almost enough to give me jazz hands (a York peppermint patty is enough to give Sherry jazz hands, so clearly we have different thresholds). We’re completely enamored with this floor – and there’s a budding romance that involves a saw – so let’s cover the laundry room tile installation, from floor prep to grouting & sealing. Before any tile could get installed, the subfloor needed to be prepped with some cement board, which is a preferred surface for tile installation. They come in 3ft x 5ft sheets, so I was able to fit two full pieces plus a few strips in the room.

Installing drywall doesn’t have to be intimidating and, in fact, you can do it all by yourself! I was able to do our entire laundry room (including the ceiling) in one day AND without an extra set of hands. So today I’ll show you how and the secret weapon that made it all possible. Drywall Installation Tools & Materials Here’s what you’ll want to have on hand if, some of it is optional depending on the difficulty of your job: Drywall, we used 4 x 8′ UltraLight Sheetrock Drywall lift (we rented ours for $40!) An electric drill, in hindsight I wish I’d gotten a drywall screw gun Drywall setting drill bit (to countersink heads into the

Yes, this is a post about how to run dryer duct work and reroute HVAC vents. Why would I make a horribly punny reference to a 22-year-old Disney hockey movie if it weren’t? But first, some background. By the time Monday’s post was going up, David the framer was here putting the finishing touches on our new laundry room by adding that fourth and final wall (the one that will have the door that leads to the hallway). He also added the wall that will eventually house the frosted door to the current storage / future TV room. I took the picture from this side to get around that lovely plastic sheet, which helps us

Let’s talk about knocking out a few walls and framing a few new ones, shall we? For two weeks we had virtually no progress in our laundry area, except for rethinking our approach and considering contractor bids. So by comparison, things happened so swiftly over the last few days that it nearly put our heads on spin cycle. What started out looking like this… …is now looking a bit more like this. Yowza. Let’s rewind to early last week, when it clicked that maybe we could do more ourselves and sub-contract certain jobs out instead of relying entirely on one contractor and his team. As you may recall from this post, Option 4 is our

After much deliberation, our laundry area is finally seeing some action. Well hello there, washer…. shall we take this to the bedroom? No literally, we took it to the bedroom. JEALOUS? Seriously though – it has been a busy week around here (mostly with unrelated book stuff) but we’ve managed to get some dust flying upstairs too. Long story short, thanks to a lot of thought (and a lot of encouraging comments from you guys) we’ve decided to do more ourselves, while managing some pro sub-contractors directly. Our second contractor estimate (after the initial $5,000 one) came in at $3,300, which was a more digestible number, but he had an impending vacation – and actually