It is said that the hardest part of a journey is taking the first step. I will say I’ve experienced that in various undertakings in my life, but this project wasn’t one of those instances. This project was a slog. It taxed me physically, mentally, and emotionally. Spanning 9 weeks but with about 7 weeks of nose to the grindstone, gut busting work. I took a week off around week 7 to take a break and enjoy an X-Men marathon with my wife and oldest son, and then it was back to the project.
I knew I needed to take some time off work to have enough time to concentrate on all I had to do. I don’t remember how exactly it came about but I believe it was my wife’s suggestion for me to spread my time off over a few weeks by taking half days off instead of full days off. That turned out to be very prescient for many reasons: One, that gave my body time to rest in between since I have a sit-down day job. Two, I was able to have time to contemplate and plan the next steps. And three, I was able to keep abreast of what was going on at work so as not to be slammed when returning like a normal full-time-off vacation. So, I scheduled 3 weeks of half days or 7.5 days (60 hours) of PTO. As the end of the 3 weeks approached, I felt I needed a little more time, so I added another week (2.5 days/20 hours).
During those time-off weeks I’d get off work at 1 pm, eat my own lunch, help my 1 and 4-year-old with their lunch, and be down to the shop by 2:00 or so. Then I’d work until it was time to cook/eat dinner, then head back down for another 2-4 hours depending on how I was feeling and whether or not it made sense to go on to the next step. That made an average of 8 hours a day, 6 days a week for those 4 weeks (192 hours) and the other 3 weeks about 3 hours a day average plus 5-6 on Saturdays (60-80 hours). So, in all, I’m estimating it took about 275 hours in total, perhaps near 300 hours including all the store trips and touch ups I’m probably forgetting. And that doesn’t include the man-hours of my kids that did painting and shelf-pin drilling and sanding and sweeping and vacuuming and probably a dozen other tasks I’m forgetting. All said and done though, it is worth it. Now onto the fun part, the before and after pictures.
The first phase of the project is what we are calling the sewing room annex, or annex for short. It shares a door with the sewing room. I’d describe it as a sort of courtyard area outside the basement apartment and between the sewing room and shop. Combined, my wife and mother-in-law have so much sewing stuff like fabric, ribbon, thread, etc we knew that we’d need a lot of storage, so this space was perfect for that. I built 8 shelving units, four that are 36 inches wide, 15 inches deep and 7 feet tall. Another four that are the same height but 30 inches wide and 12 inches deep. Here’s the before, during and after.
As I was working on that project I was thinking about next steps all the while. Painting is one of my least favorite activities. The sewing room is roughly 30 x 20’ so 600 square feet in all. Including the ceiling and walls around 9 feet tall we had 1,500 square feet of surface to paint. I knew it had to be done though and to get it done in any sort of timely manner I’d have to use a paint sprayer. Every time I read that manual and it stressed having to clean up real well so you don’t clog the hoses I kept getting intimidated. If you need a break with a roller or brush painting job, you can simply put it in a plastic bag and walk away. I was so worried I couldn’t do that with the sprayer. Finally, I had to bite the bullet and just get it done. So we got 10 gallons of the paint color we wanted and I got to work. It took a good chunk of a day to paint all the surfaces. It was tough but it was worth it in the end. The room was leased to a brewery at one point and they had a medium yellow scheme. After replacing with the very pale grey the room is so much brighter. You’ll notice a couple of things here. First, I wasn’t thinking far enough ahead and didn’t get any before pictures of the room before I had already torn down the old lighting fixtures. Which leads me to the electrical changes. I had to move the receptacles up to above the height of the countertops. That stretched me mentally to figure out that electrical piece. And as you know from earlier posts, I’m changing all my fixtures to be LED. After researching 8ft fluorescent LED replacements I decided it’d just be better to get new fixtures entirely.
We were trying to figure out the flooring for a while. We looked into epoxy coatings, simply painting, laminate tiles and other solutions. At some point my father-in-law saw a deal we couldn’t pass up. At the Habitat for Humanity ReStore he found vinyl flooring for an amazing $0.10 per sq foot. Yes, you read that right, ten cents per square foot. The caveat was that you had to buy an entire roll which varied from 1500-3500 sq feet. After lots of looking we found a pattern and color we liked. My father-in-law arranged for picking it up with his trailer. While I was working on building cabinets, he and my oldest son built a rack that we could unroll it from. We settled on a roll about 2,700 square feet so we have plenty to do the sewing room, annex eventually and any other floors we may want to do in the basement. The sticker on the roll from the manufacturer said it weighed nearly 900 lbs. They put it on my father-in-law’s trailer with a forklift, we just used rolling hand trucks and shimmying to maneuver it off the trailer.
After painting and flooring I got busy working on the cabinets. After many rounds of back and forth with various widths and depths for the cabinet units we decided on 30” wide cabinets that are 24” deep. As you’ll see in later before and after pictures that was exactly what we wanted to be able to hold some of my wife’s storage tubs at 2 tubs wide that are also 24” deep. And those have smaller counterparts that piece together to the same dimensions so that the cabinet fits her various combinations of tubs perfectly. With the size settled upon we measured, and we could fit 19 of those units along the three walls. One wall with 5, another with 8 and the last wall with 6. Then we settled on the size of the unit we call the closet for hanging finished quilts and the shelf for under the thread rack. So now I was ready to get started on building those units. First step was a trip for lumber. We asked my father-in-law to take us with his pickup truck and he obliged. That was extremely helpful because we got a ton of wood. Literally, a ton of wood. We needed 28 sheets of 3/4” plywood for all the sewing room pieces. Doing a quick internet search I found out those are about 68 lbs each so 1,904 lbs there. And we had 3 dozen or so 1x4s for trim pieces so over all it was more than 2,000 lbs of wood. That was hard to unload all the way to the basement. Shout out to my oldest son, Michael, for being a trooper on that one. The units came together well after I made some mistakes in bracing the wood to cut them and some came out uneven. It wasn’t so bad that they didn’t piece together well enough though. Shout out to my younger two boys, Theodore and Lawrence for drilling all the shelf pin holes with a jig I taught them to use. And to my oldest daughter, Vivian, and Michael, for the tremendous amount of painting they did. That definitely stretched them to do more than they thought they could.
My mother-in-law who comes many weekends to visit likes to tackle many of her sewing projects with some news or other entertainment in the background. So of course, we had to get a TV and a couch. The furniture store across the street, called Ruddick’s, had just the perfect piece. And I can’t believe how cheap televisions are now. We got this 58” bad boy from Wal-Mart for just $278. That’s 1/3rd the cost of my equivalent TV I got two years ago. My father-in-law had a TV mount on hand from years ago during his home theater installer days. It worked simply perfect for that space. So, there you have it, the completed room. You’ll notice my mother-in-law’s long arm quilt machine in the pictures. That’s a great tool you can use to quilt together a king-size quilt. That will be one aspect of the business, leasing time on the machine, whether doing it yourself or paying my mother-in-law to do your finished quilt pieces that just need stitched together.
You may notice there aren’t any doors on the cabinets. My wife and mother-in-law decided they wanted curtains instead. Their logic is excellent about the space doors need to open. We couldn’t agree exactly how we wanted to do that until I was searching online for curtain rod holders and came across the perfect solution. Room divider tracks! Just like you often see in a hospital, you can get them and they are so perfect! I was really worried about the durability of curtain rod hardware so that was my main concern. As soon as I found these I knew they were the way I wanted to go. I’ll update this in the future when my wife and mother-in-law finish the curtains but here are the tracks for now.
Since I was looking at this project as a personal/family project and not for the museum per se, and I didn’t use any museum funds for it, I didn’t keep super good track of all my expenses to get a real good grand total on the project but here are some pretty good approximations:
Wood/hardware for annex: $800
Wood/hardware for sewing room: $1,200
Flooring, including vinyl and glue: $450
Paint/polyurethane coat: $260
Lighting fixtures: $240
Curtain tracks: $400
TV: $300
Couch: $450
Grand Total: $4,100
Just for fun, here are some bonus before and after shots including more angles.
