Thursday, January 27, 2011

The Piano Room is Finished

The piano room is completely finished!  Everything is done.  All of the baseboards all of the shoe moulding, all of the thresholds, all of the window trim, all of the window handles, all of the lights, all of the painting, all of the staining, EVERYTHING!  This is the first room in our house that is completely and totally finished.  Now I can finally start making it into a real room instead of a storage room for unpacked things.

The thresholds that Doug made turned out really nice.  We got some great advice about screwing them down and filling in the holes with plugs made out of the same wood.  They are nearly invisible.


I messed around with a few different colors of stain and managed to somewhat disguise the fact that the thresholds are red oak while the floors are white oak.  It's impossible to hide the grain, but the red did get somewhat subdued by the different stains I used.  The threshold doesn't match the floor exactly, but it's a compatible shade so it blends in pretty well.

The Minwax stain colors I used were Provincial, which is a kind of neutral medium dark brown, and Driftwood, which looks like it has gray paint added to it.  I wiped the Provincial off almost immediately but I let the Driftwood sit on there for about ten minutes before wiping.  Then I put on three coats of oil-based semigloss polyurethane that we already had on hand and that made it a little shinier than I wanted it to be.  But I'm sure it will get scuffed up soon enough and look more normal.  I'll get some satin next time.



Here's the completely finished room.  Look at those cute sconces on the sides of the windows!  I am really going to enjoy spending time in here. 


Damn!  I just noticed it's not completely finished yet - we don't have doorknobs!  Sheesh, it's always something.  Okay, the doorknobs are next!  I've grown so accustomed to not having doorknobs that I didn't even notice they were missing.  But at least I can start unpacking everything now.

Monday, January 10, 2011

Thresholds


Doug has spent the past two days making custom thresholds for the piano room. They are very wide because the walls into this room are so thick. We left a pretty big space between the two different flooring materials partly so that we could use a wide threshold to make the slight height differences seem less noticeable. It's a pretty smooth transition and although it looks kind of ridiculous in the picture, it looks great in the room. The top photo is the doorway from the piano room into the back hallway.
 

This threshold is between the piano room and the foyer.  The piano room floor is slightly higher than the foyer and both floors are floating so the threshold here is going to function as a giant T-moulding.  It's pretty massive, but it's very smooth to walk on or over from one room to the next.

I'm probably going to stain it to match the darker parts of the white oak flooring to make it less noticeable that the thresholds are red oak.  They don't seem to sell white oak boards at Home Depot.


We are trying to get this room completely finished as soon as possible.  Doug did a fantastic job with the door trim and baseboards, don't you think?  It turned out exactly the way I was hoping it would.  Now I have to paint all of that fancy trimwork plus a pair of french doors - the kind with millions of window panes.  Fun, Fun, Fun!