Making #DadTime with Lowes and home improvement

I have partnered with Life of Dad and Lowe’s for this promotion. One of my best early memories of my dad was when he helped out at my elementary school. The classes were building wooden toy cars and he was there helping put them together. That was one of the first things I remembered when he told my wife that I was always better than him at fixing things. He sends me indirect praise through my wife like that, he’s old school. Now that our kids are getting older I’m doing my best to include them in some quality #DadTime Lowes projects around the house so that I can tell the same thing to their wives in 20 or 30 years.

I jest, I’ll tell them to their faces that they’ll never be able to fix things as well as I can.

Realistically, they’ll be handier and able to do more than I, if nothing else because I’m doing my best to teach them how to correctly do the simple things. To give you an idea of our DIY comfort skills, we’ll switch out electrical outlets, remove molding, repair major dings in the wall and can fix that 4” hole that’s in our bedroom, I’ve just been busy. I’m a 7 on the handy scale of things, if that helps.

Our current project is relatively simple in that we need to paint our bathroom cabinets. The bathroom needs more than that, but we’re leaving the seashell sinks and gold plated plumbing for the next owner-or us next spring, whichever comes first. Our current house is awesome, but we’re doing a series of small fix ups, just in case we choose to sell it for something with a basement.

‘Project –oooh, can I help?’ our 6 year old questioned when we heard us mention it.

The dad-who-wants-to-shower in me wanted to proceed and knock the project out quickly. However, that’s not the way to encourage his curiosity and what he might enjoy. After thinking about it, painting the bathroom cabinets is a simple job, it just has lots of small steps until it’s completed.

He helped remove the hardware from the doors, which he loved doing. Some of the screws required me to jump in and either hold the door or firmly place the drill into the screw. Whenever that happened he was always quite patient and eager to get back to work. After each hinge was removed he put it, plus the screws into a plastic bag, just in case we had to reuse any of them.

When doing anything with a drill don’t go low end. Lowe’s has the new Kobalt 24 Volt Drill Driver available now. It’s got a 24 position clutch, an extra cell in the battery that means 50% more power-plus 3.6 longer run time and 10X longer battery life. With Father’s Day just around the corner it’s a great chance to upgrade dad’s drill, or hook him up with a Lowe’s gift card, just in case he knows what he wants.

The next step in our project was to lightly sand the doors and cabinet surfaces. Due to the noise involved and the need to really get into the crevices of the door’s molding we did all of this. It did not take lots of sanding, but the surface had to be agitated. We hit all of the surface areas with coarse and then fine sand paper to smooth things out before the primer went on.

Before the primer came the dings in the walls. Sometimes it was pulled off drywall parts, scratches or whatever-we patched them up, let up dry and they quickly got in the primer line.

Priming is something that the kids could’ve helped with, but by this time it was 11:00PM and they were asleep, so we put on the first coat of primer.

The next day started early and he wasn’t too keen on working, so we put on the first coat of Valspar paint on without him. Because we were painting on a surface that was original wood, with one coat of primer we did need a second coat of the final color on the cabinets.

For us the most challenging part was hanging the cabinet doors back up. The pilot hole did not line up to the hardware that we replaced. Because of that we had to drill new holes and screw them in-ensuring that the hardware was parallel with the door. On more than a couple doors we realized that it was not level and it was very obvious. On those doors we had to remove the hardware, triple check for level and then hang them.

We chose NOT to hang the door on the first coat of paint to avoid any paint run lines or drops. Granted we could’ve hung them, but then we would’ve had to monitor very closely for any running, which would’ve been very obvious in a main room like the bathroom.

Once the doors were hung (with the first coat of paint) they could be touched up by our older child. I correctly showed him how to only dip 1/8” of the brush into the gallon of paint, followed by a strong up-and-down of the paint brush. I turned my head for a moment to look at some spots and the entire paint brush was in the gallon. I raised my voice a bit and he immediately realized that he goofed. We moved past that and he proceeded to touch up all of the low cabinet doors.

His younger brother even got in on the action with the side cabinets that didn’t have much to touch up. As a parent it wasn’t the amount of work they did, it was their happiness, enjoyment and utter satisfaction at having legitimately helped. Now they’re both asking about other project that they can help with. We already do the Lowe’s Build And Grow projects. They’re worth doing, free and really fun for children that like to build or tinker. You need to RSVP, so dig into their site for the closest one to you.