Adding a Door to Our Bathroom Archway: Part II

Continued from Part One of my post about adding a door to an arched bathroom entrance. In Part One, a friend from church used his nail gun to place a frame inside our archway (pictures of frame in Part One.)

Dad Fix Tip #7: How to Frame in an Archway - Part Two

Our drywall installer came over yesterday to drywall the arched doorway frame. We've been waiting about a month for this particular installer because he comes highly recommended AND he only charged us $50! I could have nailed the drywall to the frame myself but if I had attempted the taping, applying putty and texturizing, it would NOT have looked nearly as nice. Plus, I figure, for $50 I get a one-on-one lesson from a professional on how to do this stuff :-)

Cutting the top arch semi-circle crescent out of drywall. Tool: razor knife.

Cutting strips to use along sides of door frame

Nailing strips onto sides of door frame

Drywall is completed on the frame. Nail heads are visible.

Joint compound used to seal seams and cracks. Mix with water until mud-like texture.

He mixed a second type of mud in for the final coat (lessened the drying time?)

All the putty is smoothed with a trough (trow?) In the foreground, you can see two types of tape that he used. One looks like wide masking tape, the other a green "mesh" or net-looking tape. The first tape was creased long-ways (vertically) and placed down the 90 degree seams (where "old" wall met new drywall). Putty went on before and after this tape and smoothed. The mesh tape was used over joints or seams that were flat. I think it was to prevent cracking after the putty dried.

Masking tape in the 90 degree corner (yellow-ish color), mesh tape over the seam where two pieces of drywall came together. Putty easily covers all tape, nail heads and any other cracks or holes. Blue paint on the far left is our bedroom wall (before the 90 degree curve to the archway).

This is the view from inside the bathroom. Archway fades into a square door top.

He used real masking tape to tape off an area around the doorway to prep for spraying the texture. That's our collection of Disneyland neck lanyards hanging inside the bathroom. They are not hanging from the top of the doorway, it just looks like they are. After laying a base layer of masking tape (as a boundary), he taped on a series of draping plastic sheets to keep the texture spray from overspraying onto other parts of our room. He kinda of created his own little paint booth by taping and draping so that only his work area was exposed.

Final product from inside bathroom. Texture complete. Its evening now and a little darker in the picture. It took him about 4 hours, working by himself to do this part of the project (and he was very quick in his motions, he was definitely a seasoned veteran.) I think he said it would take about 4-5 hours for the whole thing to dry. He said we could "lightly sand it" and then paint.

This is the finished view from outside our bathroom. The inner door (door gives privacy to the toilet) is opened in the background showing pictures inside the toilet room (we kinda had a bathroom inside a bathroom or more accurately, a toilet room inside a bathroom). Does that make sense?

I didn't take a picture of his texture sprayer and couldn't find one on google images. It reminded me of an old bug sprayer kinda like this one but NOT red and no canister at the end. It was a long tube but had a much bigger diameter. I'm guessing he stuck the tube down inside his bucket of texture and used the handled piston to draw-up the texture. Then sprayed the texture out by pushing the piston inward. It gave a sort of splattered effect which matched the texture on our walls near perfectly.

Now all we need is to have the door hanged (or is it hung?) I don't do drywall...or grammar well. LOL. We're one step closer to having a completely private bathroom (remember, we have six daughters!) As mentioned in my first post about this project, this room could also be used as a saferoom with a little help from Door Jamb Armor.

XP Anti Virus and Vista Total Security Virus Removal (Trend Micro Housecall vs Malwarebyte Anti-Malware)

XP Total Security, Vista Total Security Virus

Dad Fix Tip #5: How to Remove a Google Redirect Virus

As previously blogged, this is a quick tutorial on how I removed a virus I found on my home computer. Turns out, there were over 27 viruses on my little Dell PC. For the record, I've found NONE on Wifey's Mac but we also don't let our teen and pre-teen daughters use the Mac (I'm sure that's just a coincidence WINK WINK.)

So, the symptoms were simple. I couldn't get any of my browsers to surf the web. Not Safari, Chrome, Maxthon, IE or Firefox. Any URL I typed in showed me a page that warned of an unsafe destination and that I should use the XP Total Security program to get me there safely. Right.

A quick google search for "XP Total Security virus" fetched me several results. I found the one HERE (thanks to Bleeping Computer) to be 100% effective. Follow the directions step-by-step and it should work for you too. NOTE: if you have this virus, you might need to visit my blog on your smart phone, secondary laptop, work computer or something other than the infected computer. I used my Droid Incredible.

Either read through the instructions and follow along on a second sytem or print out the instructions. HOWEVER, you will need to download some programs. There are instructions on how to download the necessary files onto your phone and then transfer. That is exactly how I did it. If you have to use a secondary computer, just download to a thumb drive or equivalent.

Before downloading these, read the directions eluded to HERE.

FixNCR.reg (http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/reg/FixNCR.reg)

RKill Download Link - (Download page will open in a new tab or browser window.)

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware Download Link (Download page will open in a new window)

FixNCR will fix your registry. RKill will stop the virus from running. Malwarebyte will find and remove the virus completely. NOTE: it took over an hour for Malwarebyte to completely search my C: drive and turned up with 27 viruses (all of which it fixed).

Prior to this method of fixing the virus, I ran Trend Micro's Housecall twice. It found 6 bugs the first run and two bugs the second run. Even after deleting or fixing the bugs, I STILL had the XP Total Security virus. I had also ran HiJackthis and did everything it recommended but still had the viruses. Both of these programs are free and USED TO BE fairly successful. Not so much anymore.

So there ya go. That should help you rid your computer of the XP Total Security virus, or for Vista users its the Vista Total Security 2011 virus. Either way, good riddens!

Remove Mac Guard Virus aka Mac Defender via Intego VirusBarrier X6

Dad Fix Tip #6: How to Remove a Mac Virus

Well well. Seems the Might Mac isn't so impenetrable after all. Now, for the second time in history, the Mac community has found itself in the throws of viral attack. How did I find out? It showed up on Wifey's MacBook

Sneaky little virus too. When you get it, the webpage it shows looks just like the Mac Finder interface (see image, CLICK FOR LARGER VIEW.)

It attempts to fool you into thinking you are being instructed by your Mac to download a protection or antivirus tool. If you click on the link provided, you will see the following image:

 If you click the Continue button as directed, you will download a program called AVRunner (avsetup.pkg). Now, unlike the previous variants of this fake antivirus, no administrator’s password is required to install this program and it will automatically execute.

Two things you need to do:

Step One: Quit Safari (close it). Disable your Mac's factory default option that allows Safari to autorun any "safe" download. in Go to Safari’s General preferences tab and uncheck the “Open ‘safe’ files after downloading” option.

Step Two: Download Intego VirusBarrier X6 and run it. It will tell you if it detects a virus. Then, follow the prompts and you're done. It took me less than five minutes to fix Wifey's Mac.


Done.