*Project Tutorials ~ The Adventure Bite

Kitchen Lighting Progress

By Dani Meyer, on March 12th, 2013

We started this kitchen lighting project eons ago it feels like. It really was only two months ago which, in the grand scheme of things isn’t that long ago. The last two months have been a whirlwind of trying to get the garden and animals up to speed before the oppressive summer heat hits and this little baby is here. As such most of the interior projects have gotten put on hold until we can breathe again after we get the watering system in place and the summer seedlings in the ground in the next month.

But before all that craziness started I did actually get one more step finished in the light project that I haven’t had a chance to share.

I am happy to report that I was successful in stripping all the paint off of our crazy looking half finished light shades:

And getting them frosted and rehung:

After a few more sessions with the paint stripper on some of the tougher spots of red, I used Rust-oleum’s Frosted Glass Spray Paint to frost the glass:

Lots of thin coats resulted in a quite satisfactory outcome. As with all of Rust-oleum’s products I was once

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DIY Vertical Backsplash Installation

By Dani Meyer, on January 24th, 2013

After months of staring at this super frustrating half finished project with no energy I am excited to say I was able to jump back into working on it this week! You might remember when we started our backsplash installation that we decided to tile it vertically.

We decided to install the tiles vertically to give it a unique look and to follow the vertical lines we have from the paneling on the bottom half of the room. This does result in a bit more complicated cuts (and it seems a bit more wasted pieces) but after two sessions of working with it I have a few tips to share.

First off there’s no reason to fear these little tiles, they aren’t nearly as hard to work with as you might think. For starters they come attached to the mesh backer which holds them securely into the thinset:

Cutting the sheets is easy with a pair of scissors, though it does take a few tricks to get it going fast. You want to cut it with the mesh side up and move the tiles around your scissors to create the most open channel possible to get in for your cuts. You’ll notice in the image above, that for the upright cuts if you fold

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Fixing Off Centered Kitchen Lighting

By Dani Meyer, on January 16th, 2013

In the last couple weeks we have been slowly coming back up to speed in the home improvement arena as I have started to feel better. We have been trying to take it little bits at a time instead of biting off any big projects we might not be able to finish. One of those smallish projects we had been putting off was the kitchen lighting situation.

When we redid the whole ceiling in the house we had installed a temporary work light in the kitchen which hung precariously off its wires so that the texture could be put up. Turns out life gets crazy sometimes and what you think will be there for a few weeks maybe a few months can end up sticking around for a few years.

Yup that bad boy had been our only light source in the kitchen this whole time. A few weeks ago when one of the light bulbs burned out we really started realizing it was bad.

You might remember we were talking about doing a track lighting setup in the kitchen. Turns out it was going to be pretty expensive and it seemed like a daunting task with my energy level.

The problem was that our light in the kitchen was massively off centered in the room (why? who knows….). So simply swapping it out wasn’t going to work. But I still

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No More Fishbowl….

By Dani Meyer, on October 19th, 2012

The last couple of weeks months we have been in a bit of a lull with the whole home renovations gig. Between our new exercise program, Kevin’s new position at work, an increasingly active toddler, tons of events, blogging and now being in the first trimester of baby Meyer #2 we have just been plain tired.

I’m still stalled out halfway through the backsplash project (hoping to knock it out this weekend/upcoming week) and other than maintaining we haven’t had much going on as far as house stuff.

But last night in a desperate attempt to just do something on our list and get my brain to chillax I asked Kevin to help me hang the curtains in the living room. Sorry these photos aren’t the best…..capturing full images of stuff in this house near windows is almost impossible for some reason…..it tweaks the colors so badly.

Here’s our naked windows….

And seeing as we live with a rather public view from a store across the street we pretty much have zero privacy in here without any curtains. Fishbowl all the way.

These windows also desperately need to be replaced but until then our heavy duty curtains should help keep some extra heat in during this winter. So this is also like Winter prep….we are so on top of it.

It’s crazy how such a little project can take so much umph to get going when we haven’t been knocking things

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How to Tile A Glass Mosaic Backsplash Over Paneling

By Dani Meyer, on September 11th, 2012

In a last minute somewhat rash decision making process I decided to turn our glass mosaic backsplash project upside down. Or rather sideways down. Err. Whatever. I flipped our backsplash tiles vertically last minute and am totally loving it.

After removing the paneling, and converting a single outlet to a double outlet, Kevin tackled getting all the cement board installed. He used a scoring knife we picked up from Home Depot and our jigsaw to cut the board and we used the special green cement board screws to attach it. He discovered that by screwing it in once and then backing out and rescrewing 1-2x he was able to get the screws very flush to the board. Since it was so important for this step to be done as exact as possible it took several sessions to get through this part. But once he was finished I jumped in for my part.

I sanded down the rough seam of the drywall to the cement board and roughed up the paint to help with the adhesion of the thinset.