Flooring Extravaganza

Once we had all of the cabinets painted and re hung, we were so much happier in the house. The kitchen has been brightened. The first week of working on the house we had the AC guy come out and now we have a brand new central airconditioner, furnace and touch screen thermostat. It was definantly worth it.

We did run into a couple of minor injuries the second week of renovations. Beyond just the typical bumps and bruises, cuts and scratches, I hurt my pinkie on my right hand somehow... I think it's the tendons in my hand that are just not used to being used as much as they were that week. It's been a little under two weeks now and It's feeling much better. It's still not healed, but at least I can grip things again.

This past week has been a flooring adventure. After one MAJOR trip to home depot, we had our tile, laminate hardwood, and carpet purchased. The carpet is going to be installed sometime next week. (Cross your fingers for us that it comes in early.)

Our tile adventure came on Saturday. Our good friends Katie and Paul (who were just engaged on Friday, CONGRATULATIONS!!) came over since Paul has some tile experience. The boys ran into some difficulty with the stairs. Our tiles are 16''x16'' and we have a lot of weird angles they had to work around. The stairs needed to be reinforced and the lip of the stairs had to be evened out. Then we ran out of the stairnosing around 9:30 and home depot closes at 10. We hurried to the first one and they were out, so we had to book it across town to the other one and HOPE that we got there in time. We did. When the tiles were finally done, it was 4:30 in the morning and we were all exhausted.... but they looked fabulous.

Katie and I came back in on Monday and grouted the entry way and yesterday we finished by the back door. On Sunday we started laying our laminate hardwood. It was much easier than the tile BUT it does burn through the saw blades really fast. We finished last night after going through 6 saw blades.... good thing they're only $5.50 a piece... Our finished product is beautiful and I finally feel like it's coming together. We've moved small things over already and we're going to hopefully finish all of the small things today. We are very happy with the results.

It's finally feeeling like a home for us. We're both exhausted, so I'm glad to see the light at the end of the tunnal. It'll be great when we have our home all set up.

Next we'll be looking for window treatments, rugs, and art....

Getting out the dirty.

After we used the flooring as our drop cloth... we were ready to get the nasty pee smell outta there. Our friend Rolin came over and helped us (Ben) remove all of the heavy stuff (that I couldn't help with...)

They ended up having to throw the carpet out of the master window... rolling it down the roof... and onto my car. A minor casuality...

After the guys removed all of the carpet and heavy stuff, we were able to start cleaning up our kitchen, starting with the cabinents...

Painting

Once we were able to pull off the popcorn ceilings, it was onto cleaning up. We had soo much dust and debris on the floor, you couldn't step in the house without ingesting about a pound of dry wall dust.

After the dust was up, we started our painting adventure. Here are a few before and after pictures. Here is the living room, the kitchen and the master bedroom.

And here they are



now...

Popcorn Ceilings...

So as soon as we pulled off all of the tobacco covered wallpaper, we scrubbed down the walls and decided we needed to get rid of the popcorn ceilings. My mom came in town to help for a week and my good friend Katie came over to help.

Scraping popcorn isn't the most fun. First you have to spray down the popcorn which is annoying in itself. You have two choices: 1. Carry around a squirt bottle and get cramps in your thumbs from spraying the whole ceiling or 2. bring in the garden hose. We opted for number two. Then you have to scrap every inch of the ceiling down, getting covered with popcorn while you do it. Once that all dries, you come back in with a sander and you sand everything down making the ceiling very smooth and you covered in dry wall dust. It gets everywhere and in every part of your body you never want dry wall to be.

After everything was scraped, we started priming and painting. Our living room and family room are a light tan color and our kitchen and bathroom are yellow. Upstairs we have a sage green bedroom, a teracotta bedroom and a brown master.

Even Kira helped with the taping!

Our New House

We decided to look at houses this past spring and felt rather road blocked with our price range. Everything we looked at was either too small, needed too much work, or wasn't in a neighborhood we wanted to live in. Until our realtor called us and told us that great split level house was coming on the market. It had two living rooms, an open kitchen, a fenced in back yard and three bedrooms in a great neighborhood. It did need some work, but mostly updating. It was exactly what we were looking for. And so we put an offer on it and it was accepted.

And so our adventures began. Since we got back from our honeymoon, we've been very busy. Everyday has had some project of some sort. Our goal is to move in by the end of next week. (Especially since our lease is up Aug 1st) Here are the things we knew we needed to do before moving in:

New paint (which required wall paper removal, and priming every room)

New appliances

New flooring( in every single room)

Install central air

New furnace

The old owners weren't the cleanest people. They smoked in the house for over 20 years and all of the walls were covered in yellow tobacco stains. They also allowed their dogs to potty alllllllll over their house. And by allllll over I mean ALLLLLLL over. Every piece of trim work, all carpet, all vinyl.... the dogs just peed on everything. It was the grossest smelling house I've ever smelt.

They also really enjoyed country cottage decorating.... which is so not our style. But we've been working slowly on making things our own. Our first step was getting rid of all of the wallpaper. And so we did. It took about three days to take all of the boarders off and all of the covered outlets and switches... but it's now done. We have a wallpaper free house. :)

This was the bathroom with the wallpaper from hell.... it would not come off for the life of me...