Website of Jason Lopes

Hot damn, these cabinets look good!

The Ona MW series cabinets are chock full of powder coated, steel goodness with wooden fronts.  Nice combination of industrial and organic elements.  They’re also reasonably priced started at under $500 for the smaller version with a single drawer.  Once you move up into the double drawer, larger version you’ll end up paying over $1000 per unit.

I think I need to pick up a new digital camera.  While my Casio Exilim S880 performs adequately in well lit spaces, I’m ashamed at the amount of noise it introduces into pictures taken in dimly lit areas.

This first picture is of our new stairway, railing and offers a partial glimpse of our new front door.

This is another shot of the stairway/hallway, taken from the living room.

Here is a picture of our kitchen with the upper cabinet lights turned on.  I still need to finish the last row of tile on the backsplash but haven’t had a chance.  It looks ok without it but I wanted to clean up the edge with a trim kit from Schluter Systems.

Here is a picture taken of our living room.  Right now it’s sparsely furnished with a Reed sofa and two Blox armchairs from Cassina.  If time permits I’ll build some coffee tables.  If not, I’ll  just pick something up as a temporary solution.  These things are built like tanks with a solid steel frame; I’m sure we’ll get years of use out of them.  The fabric is also of a very high quality.

This picture was taken from the living room and shows our dining room and the door into our backyard.  Next spring I’m going to attempt to build a deck back there.  The solid walnut dining table is made by an Australian company called X-Pand.  It’s a clever design that can grow to accommodate more guests without  requiring the use of leaves; Instead, it uses an accordion-like center structure made from thin strips of wood.

I finally got a chance to start framing the perimeter walls in my basement.  Though the going was slow, I got a good deal of work done in four hours or so.

Dealing with overhead pipes proved to be a real pain in the ass and was probably the most time consuming part of the construction.  Fortunately, the framing itself was fairly painless.

I’m really enjoying working with these light-gauge steel studs.  They weigh next to nothing, they cut very easily, and make for easy cleanup.  So far my biggest gripe would be with the tin snips that I’ve been using.  They don’t do a very good job of cutting across the wider part of the stud.  Home Depot sells a set of tin snips that have an angled cutting head that I bet would do a much better job.  I’ll have to swing by there sometime during the week so I can pick up a set.

I still have one wall left in this part of the basement but will hopefully finish it up, as well as run some electrical, next weekend.  I hope to be able to install the floor, insulation, and drywall before December 1st.

Recently, Apartment Therapy posted, on  their weekly sales calendar, that Cassina was having its yearly warehouse sale.  Fortunately for me, it was at the Huntington warehouse which is only about 30 minutes from my home.  I left work early on Friday and Christine and I were off to do some furniture shopping.  Despite the fact that we didn’t buy anything I ended up leaving a happy camper; they had tons of great stuff in immaculate condition and I knew if I returned for the final two days I would find a hidden gem.  This was pretty much the polar opposite of the Ligne & Roset warehouse sale that Christine and I attended several months back; most of the furniture there looked as if it had been horribly abused and the prices were unreasonably high.

On Saturday we returned, after a good night’s sleep, determined to find a good deal.  Surely enough, we spotted a, deeply discounted, Reef Sofa, in new condition, that we hadn’t see on Friday.  The sales assistant there confirmed that they had unboxed the sofa Friday before closing.  We haggled our way into a better discount and purchased the sofa.  Our goal mission was successful, but we weren’t yet done with our shopping.  We spent a good deal more time looking for arm chairs.  We saw two, beautiful Blox chairs for sale, but their price hadn’t been steeply reduced and the sales person didn’t seem too keen on dropping the price further.  That didn’t deter us; we knew we had to return Sunday to pick up the sofa, since we didn’t want to pay the outrageous $300 delivery fee, so we figured we could haggle him down on their last sale day.

Sunday rolled around and we rented our U-Haul truck and drove back to Huntington.  We spoke with the same salesperson again regarding the Blox chairs and, after more haggling,  he agreed to drop their price and give us a whopping 70% off! 

Finally, many moons after our first floor renovation is complete, we have furniture in our living room.  Sometime in the coming weeks I’ll take some pictures of our home and post them.  I’m pretty happy with the way things have turned out.

I recently purchased a Fuji Industrial Spray Equipment Q4 PRO 4-Stage HVLP Spray System from Amazon.com and it just arrived yesterday.  Now I can sate my curiosity and see what it’s really like to lay down some paint with a quality piece of equipment other than a brush or a roller.  In addition to using this for home improvement projects that I’m working on, including a basement remodel, repainting trim, and repainting interior doors, I also intend to experiment with spraying any of my woodworking projects with lacquers, varnishes, or shellacs.

I also purchased some spray tips, a set of spray cups, an extension whip, some protective goggles, and a respirator.  Hopefully I’ll have some time to play around with this over the next few weeks.