Fountain

I've started to get back to gardening now that the weather is so perfect. I also installed a fountain in the front courtyard. 

I bought the floor sample here. It was the exact style, size, and color that I wanted and I like fountains that look a little old and worn, so the floor sample was perfect. This particular fountain is made by Al's Garden Art and is the Espana model in the color Rustico (light rust color when dry and very dark brown when wet). They sell to retailers around the US and there is a search on their website for you to find a local retailer. 

During paver install I had run conduit under the pavers right where the fountain is because I knew this was where I wanted a fountain to be and we also needed a path for the drip system hoses to reach all the planters. Well... I realized that the drip hose is taking up most of the space in the conduit, so I had to run a new one. I forgot to take pictures, but it wasn't that big of a deal to lift up a section of pavers to run a new conduit. This conduit is for the fountain's water supply and the pump's electric.

I had the fountain company deliver and set up the fountain. It's about 660 pounds, so it's a bit too heavy to be a DIY for us. The delivery also included an auto fill valve set up. They set the bottom basin on carpet padding to compensate for any unevenness in the pavers. The bottom basin could crack if placed on a hard uneven surface.

 Pump from Home Depot. **I found the "flow control" to be totally useless! I ended up adding a T valve to have better control of the water flow.**

The auto fill valve is connected to a hose bib using small drip line.

Because this fountain is 52" high with only a 46" inch bottom basin, there will be a certain amount of splash-over. This can be controlled by the flow of your pump and the height of the water line in the bottom basin. I had to turn the pump down to just a trickle in order to have zero splash-over. The sound is till nice with the flow so low.

 Splash-over with pump on full power.

Turned the pump down using a T valve added to the tubing after the pump. No splash-over. That's the refill-valve floater there in the bottom basin and the white on the right side of the basin is water deposits from all the over splash after a few days. Since I've turned the flow of the pump down and we had some rain, the deposits vanished on their own.

I'll work on adding a link with a video of this fountain (and some of the other fountains I looked at) so you can hear how it sounds at different speeds. I know that's important to some people. When I went fountain shopping it was amazing how all the fountains sound different. I even thought some had an annoying sound, so I recommend you try to listen to any fountain running (if you can) before buying.

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Laundry Room / Butler's Pantry

Cabinet guys have been here and installed cabinets in the laundry room and added the missing cabinet doors for the kitchen. I'm so happy with the way it came out!!! We ended up doing wood counter-tops, from IKEA, ourselves. They are super affordable and not that complicated of a DIY project.

Cabinet doors around fridge were installed.

Also added a pot rack in front of the hood. It is made of 2 Fintorp rails (and Fintorp hooks) from IKEA. They are very easy to trim to size and you can connect as many as you need together.

Installing laundry cabinets

 The cabinets are custom made by the same cabinet maker that made my kitchen. If you're in Arizona and would like his contact info, email me and I'd be happy to send it to you.

The sink is a Domsjo single bowl farmhouse sink. It is meant to be inset, but we rigged it to be undermount. That lip on the sink is meant to rest on top of the countertop, but if you cut a notch out in the cabinet front you can lower the sink to be under the counter.

Support brackets below sink.

I ended up changing the location of the sink from where I thought I'd put it when we built, so the plumbing had to go quite a distance.

After going back and forth between countertop choices I found that Ikea had a top that would work with only one seam at the faucet.

I made a template out of poster board.

This is 2 pieces of IKEA's Varde.

 Fitting the template on top of the two pieces.

First we cut out the outline and put in place to make sure the fit was perfect. Then we cut the opening for the sink.

Using a Dremel to round the edges of the sink cutout

  The Varde countertops come packaged with two metal rods running in a groove across the width. That kinda sucked because I ended up with two gaps at the top of the sink opening. That was unexpected, but Thomas did a fantastic job of making wood plugs that practically disappear.

 Stained with a mix of mostly English Chestnut and just a bit of Red Mahogany and finished with 3 coats of wipe on poly.

Sanded the top with steel wool until smooth as glass.

Close-up of the wood plugs at sink

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Dyeing an Ektorp Slipcover

* This chair was featured on Ikea Hackers (YAY!! Thank you Jules!!) and some of the comments said that RIT dye fades really fast. I've had the chair for six months now and I haven't noticed any fading. I've posted a recent picture at the bottom of this post.

This was a white cover for an Ikea Ektorp chair that I dyed fuchsia. I was so nervous about getting the color right and that the dye would stain my washing machine. BUT....the color turned out exactly the way I hoped and my washing machine didn't permanently stain! 

I used liquid RIT dye that  I purchased at Albertson's grocery store. RIT has a great website with recipes for many custom colors here. My exact color wasn't on their website, so I guessed a bit. I knew the slipcover was about 7lbs (shown on specs on Ikea's website) and so I bought 3 bottles. My mix turned out to be 2 bottles of purple and 1/2 a bottle of cherry red. 1 bottle of RIT is good for 2lbs.of fabric.

 I set the washer to the largest load setting. First I washed the new slipcover then I removed it from the washer. I then filled the washer with hot water, added 1 cup of salt, 2 bottles of purple dye and half a bottle of cherry red. I stirred this with an old broomstick for about 2 minutes before I added the wet cover. Then I manually stirred the cover around in the dye for about 5 minutes before having the washing machine agitate the cover for 30 minutes, then let it drain and rinse and spin.

 I repeated the rinse cycle two more times until the rinse water was mostly clear.


 To wash the washing machine I ran two old white towels through the wash cycle with detergent and 1 cup of bleach.

I did NOT put the cover in the dryer. I prefer to put the damp cover on the chair and let it air dry. That way it will naturally shrink and tighten on the chair. Polyester does not take the dye so below you can see the sections of the cover that remained white.

 The zipper and stitching also remained white.

 

  Here it is, below, after drying.

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                          1 day after dyeing                                                           6 months after dyeing