The Whatchamacallit Room Project

Every home has a room that you’re not sure what to do with, right? Or is it just us? I’m not sure. At any rate, we have a room that is next to the living room and kitchen that used to be a covered lanai. One of the previous owners decided to enclose it and make it interior space. Great idea, right?

Well, unfortunately but not surprisingly, they neglected to remove the old window frames and slider opening that had originally acted as access to the living room from the old lanai. Oh they removed the actual windows and slider, but they didn’t demolish the old openings. A great feature of this setup was that you could easily trip and fall when entering that room. Unfortunately we did not take a ton of “before” pictures of this room. But here are a few from when we were purchasing the property 3 years ago.

The pass-through to the kitchen. Note the ugly wall paint. Ugh.

One of the frames for the old windows. The seller had hung curtains there.

Here is the other side with a matching window frame and sheer curtain. The jalousie windows were installed when the lanai was enclosed.

Sparse pictures I know. But at least you don’t have to see the crappy tile that was in that room. They had put plywood down for a subfloor and then just put the tile right on top. Since plywood flexes and tile doesn’t, there were a ton of cracked tiles.

I took out some of the T1-11 so we could see the header situation here. Hey, you can see the crappy tile in this pic! Once we saw that we needed a 15 foot header we called in a contractor to install the header and demo the old window frames.

The new header is in! 4 x 4’s were added at each end to support the new header.

Next, the flooring was to be replaced. We tried to match the flooring to the original 2 1/2” x 3/ 4” red oak plank. But here on Kauai your options can be limited. We special ordered some Bruce hardwood that was really close. 4 weeks later our flooring had arrived. Well, all except 2 boxes which somehow got water damaged on the way over 🤯. Our contractor started with what we had while we waited for the other flooring.

In true HD fashion, the remaining 2 boxes got to Compton, (where all this stuff ships through) and then was forgotten about. After badgering them about this order for some time, we finally received the boxes. Unfortunately one of the boxes contained planks THAT WERE WAY DARKER THAN ALL THE OTHER WOOD WE RECEIVED!

Fortunately we had enough in the one good box – plus some that hadn’t yet been used from the original boxes – that we were able to finish the floor. A couple of dark planks were feathered in to get to the end.

The old subfloor being removed.

The new flooring. We were still short some flooring while waiting for the last two boxes to arrive. My cat, Cali, inspecting the workmanship.

We had a painter come in and paint the room with a sprayer. The ceilings are vaulted and we didn’t want to mess with scaffolding. We installed the baseboard and trim ourselves and did all the trim work and paint. The framed bamboo area used to be a window frame but we thought we could hang something cool and Hawaiian in it once it’s done…

The finished baseboard with the quarter round installed.

Wow, the room is wide open now!

So, as you can see, the room has become our exercise room… for now. eventually it may become a breakfast nook once we remodel the kitchen. But that is a project for a future post/date. 🙂 I think for the near future we only have one more imminent project – putting a real roof over our lanai – and then we will just start doing fun stuff with the yard and smaller projects. And enjoying life on Kaua’i.

Thank you for reading this post and Aloha from Kaua’i! 🏝