Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

October 18, 2017 | By Naomi |

The Great Grate Solution

As long-time readers well know, for the last five years my grate situation has not been great.

I’ve had great expectations for solving this situation over the years, but ~~I hadn’t used up all the grate-related jokes I could think of~~ nothing seemed to work, so I am forced to write another post.

Fortunately, I think I have finally solved this problem.

To quickly recap for the new kids: When we first bought our house and did a partial renovation, we removed all the old, ugly wall grates which had been painted onto the walls.

Wall Grate Disaster Confessional - The Grates Before - Plaster & Disaster

Believe it or not, the above photo (minus the arrows) was actually featured on Apartment Therapy. Not what I expected when I took it, for sure!

Replacing wall grates shouldn’t be a big deal. However, we also added new, much more substantive baseboards throughout much of the house, which ran up to or in some cases over the bottom of the duct. That meant that standard grates, which are sized to the duct and then have a lip out over the wall, wouldn’t fit on, and I certainly didn’t want to cut into the baseboard to make them fit.

This has been driving me crazy, and not just because stuff can get dropped down them and lost forever (which fortunately only happened once). The open holes make even mostly-finished rooms look like construction zones, and I’ve tried and given up on fixing this several times.

The most recent attempt involved buying a return air grille and slapping it over the hole, which seemed like a reasonable idea. However, the various standard sizes and the fact that it needs to sit over the baseboard and not centered over the hole left patches of wall showing like this:

No more!

The solution I’ve found certainly isn’t what I’d call riveting blog content. However, this was a big enough issue for me that I have to imagine there is someone out there who will benefit from this solution. You all have also heard me complain about this for long enough that it may be a relief to know it is fixed!

How to Put a Wall Register Over a Non-Standard Vent

The breakthrough happened when I decided I was willing to spend a little more money on full-on wall grates (as opposed to grilles – I’ve found they come in a wider variety of sizes) AND when I decided I would just jump in and stick the darn things on the walls via whatever means necessary.

I shopped around for a style that I liked that had dimensions that would correctly cover the holes in my wall. Unlike conventional register shopping where you buy based on the inside dimensions of your duct, I looked at the overall dimensions and just made sure I had enough overhang to attach it to the wall but not so much that the wall would show through the open area. Some places had these dimensions clearly spelled out, but in some places I had to look for the overhang measurement and add it on, or just guess.

I finally picked out a bunch that I was hopeful would work from Signature Hardware. They were a little more expensive than the ones at places like Home Depot, but I liked the style and they match another that I already have.

While they were the right size to cover the hole, they wouldn’t fit on with the louvers on the back. It felt a little silly to immediately disassemble and discard half of the product I’d just bought, but I did what I had to do.

This left me with a “correctly” sized grate, but one that had inconvenient metal bits sticking out of the back (that used to hold the louvres on) which interfered with it laying flat against the wall.

They were too tough to flatten with a hammer, so I used my dremel with a metal cutting attachment to cut them off:

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only challenge to overcome with this project. The grates are made to be held up by pressing against the inside of the duct, which I could no longer do since I had removed the entire back part of the product.

I first thought I could get the wall grate to stay up using sticky tack – yes, that stuff that held posters to the wall of your college dorm. I could not. It held it up for a little while, and then would fall off the wall randomly, creating a loud clang that makes you think someone just broke a window to rob you in the middle of the night.

I was left with no choice but to make holes in my new expensive grates.

Using a small bit suitable for cutting metal, I drilled small holes in the top two corners of each grate, and then attached them to the wall using small nails.

I then used ORB spray paint (sprayed onto a disposable lid, and then dabbed on with a craft brush) to cover over the silver of the nail so it would blend in with the grate.

From a distance, you really can’t tell!

I can’t even describe what a big difference this makes in my house. Not only are we no longer scared of losing cherished items into our walls, but each room looks a lot more finished and polished.

Almost like a place that adults live!

It’s hard to believe this small issue threw me for so long, but I’m thrilled to have it done. And I’m even more proud to have made it all the way through this post without once bringing up cheese graters!

October 9, 2017 | By Naomi |

Fixing Outdoor Timber Steps

I have yet another stairs related confession: my basement stairs weren’t the only no-good steps on my property. Our outdoor stairs are pretty bad, as well.

I actually think they’re attractive enough, in a rustic sort of way. We’re planning on doing a big, outdoor project soon that would involve re-siding the house and rebuilding the entry porch, and my plan would be to re-do these as part of that project (since that is where they lead). So I was pretty happy with them for now… until they started falling apart.

The wood was rotting through and breaking into pieces, and it finally got bad enough that we decided it was a safety issue. Brad and I know that you can’t really use the edge of the top step… but anyone else coming to our house wouldn’t know that.

Given that we’re planning a full re-do soon, we decided to just replace the broken pieces for functional steps, without worrying about attractiveness. Originally, I was even thinking we’d do it but wouldn’t bother posting about it on the blog since it isn’t super applicable to others. However, there were enough new tips and tricks that I learned doing this that I think its worth sharing. And who knows, someone else may have steps much like these and need to know how to fix them!

Besides, this is the exact kind of DIY project that this blog thrives on. We had no idea how the steps were put together or how to fix them, but we plunged in on the assumption that we could figure it out as we went along. (Fortunately, we were right.)

The steps are essentially two 6×6 pieces of lumber wide, stacked up over dirt. We started by clearing out all the rotted pieces: three steps in total, the top two, and the farthest forward on the first step down.

We could see after doing that that the steps had been held in place by some big nails, now pretty rusted.

We decided to fix it by replicating that same approach, so we headed off to Home Depot for some big pieces of wood (i.e., 6×6 pressure treated lumber), big nails (i.e., 60D spikes), a big drill bit (i.e., a spade bit), and a big hammer (i.e., a 4 lb blacksmith hammer).

Each step was just under 42″ long, so I hoped to get a 12′ piece and have them cut it down for me in the store. Unfortunately, they couldn’t cut something that wide, so we took home two 8′ pieces of 6×6 pressure treated lumber since that is what would fit in the car.

We then had to figure out how to cut it ourselves. I just have a circular saw, and unfortunately the blade doesn’t reach even halfway through a piece this wide.

We cut it by:

Marking the length, and making a cut through at that point with the circular saw, using a framing blade.
Flipping the wood to an adjacent side, marking and making a cut there, and repeating for all sides.
Cutting the small remaining middle piece with a hand saw.

You can see a bit of how the cuts were made in the marks on the end:

That all makes it sound easy, but it was a pain because the wood was wet and heavy and it took a while to make so many cuts precisely. Still, we got it done!

Meanwhile, Brad drove the 60D spikes into the base where the steps would go. These nails are big!

We didn’t worry too much about where the nails were placed, since we knew we’d have to measure carefully anyway and the wood he was nailing into wasn’t in great shape, so he mainly put them in where they’d “stick.”

The plan was to drill holes using the spade bit – sized to be just a bit larger than the nail heads – into the bottom of the wood steps, and then slot each step over it so they wouldn’t be able to wiggle around. To measure the placement of the holes, I drew a little map for the underside of each step, and carefully measured each nail in relation to each other and the sides.

Given that it was pressure treated wood, I used my new hammer drill (on the non-hammer setting) to drill these holes since it is more powerful. Even on that setting and the lowest speed, it went in FAST.

My main tip on using a spade bit on pressure treated wood is to drill in a bit, then reverse it out, and then repeat. I did this 4-5 times for each of the 4″ holes after the first one nearly got stuck in there! Since the wood is damp and the bit is removing so much of it, it’s really hard to reverse the drill out if there is a lot of matter behind it.

Even with such careful measurements, it took a bit of gentle adjustments each time we put the steps on to get all the nails to catch in the holes.

We also made sure to install the back-top step, and then fit the bricks in behind it, before we put on the front-top step, so we could get the placement right.

It took a lot longer than we planned and was pretty slow/frustrating, but overall we’re pretty impressed with how much they act like normal, functional steps!

It’s definitely not pretty to have some of them be new, while the others are old and weathered, but this project isn’t about pretty. It’s about keeping these steps safe and usable until we do our outdoor renovation, and it definitely achieved that!