Bathrooms

From this:

To this:

Let me design and build your dream bathroom! 

 

Tiling

Tile is a resilient and classic choice for walls, floors, and showers.  

Storage

Closets:

While they aren't exactly the flashiest feature of a home, closet are a vital part of a home that can add significant value and utility.

Whether you need to redesigning existing closets with custom shelves and clothes rods to fits your needs or transform an unused corner of your house into a new closet, I'd be happy to help you design storage space that works for you!

Built in shelving:

Designing and building these new bookshelves in this historic home was fun and rewarding!  The window seat opens up for added storage.  Lights installed in the crown molding add ambiance and make it easy to browse the books.

Flooring

Flooring has a big impact on the look and feel of a room.  Installing new flooring can also be a significant investment so it's worth taking your time to fully consider the benefits of different types of flooring.  

Wood flooring is beautiful and relatively soft, making it easier to stand and walk on than tile or concrete.  Solid wood flooring can be expensive but has the potential to last an extremely long time.  Since the entire board is made of the finish wood the floor can be sanded and refinished a number of times before it needs to be replaced with a new floor.  This effectively produces a brand new floor without the material and labor investment of installing new flooring.  There are also a great many quality engineered floors that combine real wood or other material veneers over various substrates.  These floors cannot be refinished like solid floors but provide great looking floors and are less likely to warp the way natural wood does making installation easier.  

Oak, maple, pine and fir are the species of wood most commonly milled into flooring.  However, if you go looking you can find all kinds of exotic species of flooring!  Aside from the look of the floor, the species will determine the hardness of the floor.  A harder floor will be more difficult to damage.  

Pre-finished or unfinished?  Most flooring comes pre-finished these days.  This means that the individual pieces of flooring are coated with polyurethane in a factory.  Unfinished flooring would be sanded and finished on site after installation.  Generally, it is more cost effective to use pre-finished flooring.  It also reduces the amount of time you (and your things) need to be out of the room where the floor is being installed.  Finally, finishing in the factory allows the temperature and humidity to be controlled precisely during the curing which, arguably, can lead to an optimal coating.  A benefit of sanding and finishing in place is that the floor can be absolutely flat.  Since pre-finished floors are not sanded (and, therefore, flattened) in place they have to have a small chamfer (a diagonal cut) along the edges where they meet the next piece.  

Sanding revitalizes a 100 year old red oak floor!  

new pre-finished solid maple flooring

High moisture areas are not ideal for wood flooring.  Although wood floors are often successfully used in kitchens and bathrooms care needs to be taken to clean any standing water immediately.  Wood is an organic material and can rot.  For this reason, it is a good idea to consider tile, linoleum, or vinyl flooring in basements, bathrooms, and kitchens.  There are many types of flooring made from engineered materials that look like wood and are impervious to water.  Often these are also so-called "floating floors" which means that pieces of flooring are connected to the rest of the floor but not the sub flooring below.  This makes them a great choice for installing over concrete floors.

Here I transitioned from wood to tile for the bathroom.  

There are lots of ways to transition from one type of flooring to another.  Ideally your floors will all be on the same plane (as above) but, if not, transition strips can be made or purchased to link the floors together smoothly.  

Also consider tile for an entryway where snowy boots or rainy umbrellas can make this a high moisture part of the house.

Interior Trim

A coped joint is the most elegant and durable way to join interior trim at a room's inside corners.  One piece of trim is cut square and meets the corner while the other is cut to meet the profile of the first.  

To make the joint, I first miter the correct end of a piece of trim stock to expose the profile as below.  

I use a coping saw (the tool in the picture above) to saw away the majority of the waste.  This operation need not be exact.  Rather, I aim to leave 1/16th of an inch and use an assortment of files to perfect the profile.  

This is how the joint meets up:

Here is another example of a coped joint.  Here I am installing picture molding, an old style of crown molding and the profile is more complex.  

cut the miter

the profile is revealed

cut away the waste

it's helpful to check the joint's fit on a scrap

Repairing Broken Trim

If you prefer to repair rather than replace a broken piece of trim, here is a method that works great and is quick.

This window sill was broken and the piece that broke off was lost.  

Make a template out of cardboard by tracing and then cutting out the shape of the missing piece.  

Trace the template onto a piece of wood of the appropriate thickness and cut it out as close as you can.  Before you cut, check to see if the edge broke at an angle.  It usually does and it helps to try to replicate this angle in the "patch" you are cutting out.  Check the patch for fit and, if you like what you see, use a router to shape the front of the patch to match the trim, if applicable.  

Nail on the patch and fill any gaps with wood 

Sand the wood filler.  

Then, prime and paint or, if you must, stain and varnish.  Repairing trim works best with painted trim, however, since the variation in grain and any wood filler will not be visible.