The Big Push

This past weekend was the last really big weekend of work that we had to do before we moved in. The to do list this weekend included prime and paint the kitchen, livingroom and laundry room, sand the floors on the side of the house not done yet and stain the floors. We also had a lot of miscellaneous things to do to make sure that we could access the basement and finished side of the house while the floors are drying over the next few weeks. One of the more fun things we got to do was go and see our slab of granite that will be turned into our kitchen counters!

 Far away shot

Close up

We are also getting a bathtub sink for the kitchen which is a double sink without the barrier between the two sinks AKA Madeline's bathtub.

For paint we decided to go on the brighter side. The kitchen is a light green that will hopefully go really well with the dark floor and mostly red small appliances that we own and the living room is a grey with a slight purple hue.

Kitchen

 Living room

I always forget how tiring painting is after awhile. It's always exciting to put the first coat of paint up to see what it's going to look like but then you still have to touch everything up and paint trim and all that which just tires you out! Luckily Jill was able to come down and help out giving us time to do all the miscellaneous things. 

Even though Nate and I were completely exhausted by Sunday afternoon, we decided to rent the sander and just plow on. It luckily only took about two and a half hours to sand down the kitchen and living room. The next picture is the view of the new floor and old floor sanded down via me sitting on the ground pooped out.

And this is the handy dandy sander. I must say the sand paper that lasts extra long from Home Depot definitely is worth it. Also, we found that if we duct taped the hose of our shop vac to the sander and sucked the dust up while we sanded then we didn't have a huge amount of dust everywhere and clean up was super easy! This time I won't have to vacuum the walls!

I at this point could barely stay awake but Nate really really wanted to see what everything looked like with the floors stained so while I chilled out Nate put down the stain. I must say that it does look good and feels good to have the house to this point.

Now we just have to wait for things to dry and put a few coats of polyurethane down and we can start putting things back where they belong! Amazingly, between last weekend and this weekend, we got so much done that we are now a week ahead of schedule! We are now going to sleep for a few weeks....

Visual Satisfaction

So it has been awhile since I've posted anything. This is mainly due to the fact that we have been doing a lot of behind the scenes work... as in behind the walls. We've been renovating the house in chunks but the one thing that we wanted to have completely up to date was the electrical. Therefore, we have been working the past few weeks first pulling out all the wiring that wasn't done correctly and then running wires and putting in outlets and switches and light boxes. Since we weren't taking down the walls all over the house this entailed either Nate working by himself running up and down stairs trying to fish wires out of the wall or one of us on one floor and the other on another floor yelling back and forth and once again fishing wires out of the wall. This was not a lot of fun and resulted in lots of scrapped hands and no real visual difference in the house. However, our entire house including the basement and outside are now correctly grounded and inspected so it is safe. We also had the plumbing done for the laundry and the kitchen. This was once again behind the walls work and so not very visually satisfying. Needless to say we've had a few weeks where we worked relentlessly but had very little to show for it.

This past weekend became much more satisfying. Since the floors are going to take about 3 weeks to really let each layer dry, this past weekend and this coming weekend are really when we need to have everything else done. This means a lot to do and not much time to do it. Luckily my dad was able to come down to help out and boy did he help. We were able to get pretty much everything we were planning on doing on Sat and Sun done on Sat and on Sun we were able to get done what Nate was planning on doing Mon plus extra! So, this is what we got done:

Insulation: I took you through how to do insulation the hard way earlier. Now comes the exceptionally easier and cheaper way (If we had only known). This time around we decided to blow insulation. This involved a few steps. 1) drill about 2 and 1/4 holes in each stud space. 2) Rent an insulation blower and buy insulation (we went for the recycled stuff) at your home improvement store.

3) Blow the insulation into the holes. This was the only tricky part. The hose would often get stuck up with insulation so we had to blow it out with our shop vac (a lot easier than shaking it out). The unit also produces a lot of dust so you want to keep it outside and so this is also difficult because you have to have a long enough hose but also you can't have it at a steep angle. 4) Fill the holes with spray in insulation

5) Trim excess spray foam when it's dry. That's it! The whole process took about 2 hours (minus letting the spray foam dry) and it took a lot less insulation than we thought and so since we got the smaller bails we were able to return the rest. Total cost including the blower (which they actually gave us for free) was about 30 bucks. Definitely the way to go especially because clean up was sweeping and vacuuming.

Install Lighting: Since we've been working on the electrical for so long, we haven't had light in the majority of the house. Once we passed the electrical inspection we were able to install lights and turn them on!

Living room lights

Kitchen can lights

We also put up lights on the back porch and front porch and the hanging lights in the kitchen (not up yet in these pics). This was one of my jobs for the day and boy did my shoulders hurt after all that keeping my arms above my head business.

Wallboard: Since we passed both out electrical and plumbing inspections, we were able to put back up the wallboard that we had to take down for the window swap and various other things. I don't have any pics of the wall board back up (Which my dad and Nate worked really hard on) so here's one of the laundry room before wallboard.

We were able to put down a rubber layer and then special floor that will hopefully reduce vibrations into the living room and the insulation will hopefully cut noise into the bedroom.

Laying the new kitchen floor: Between the wallboard and this there was a huge visual improvement in the kitchen. We were marrying up the old wood floor which was already cut on one end with the new and so we decided to do two vertical strips and the go back to horizontal.

Here you can kinda see the wallboard up around the window as well.

All done!

Puttying over the speakers: The fancy speakers that we got require you to plaster over them so they disappear into the wall. This requires A Lot of putty but they really do disappear!

Before

After

Gardening: Since spring decided to come early this year we decided to get our garden going. My dad turned the soil for the garden and I was able to plant the seeds. Hopefully we will have quite the variety of veggies this summer!. I was finally able to mulch the front gardens as well since mulch is once again available.

The flowers are even starting to come up!

We got so much done this weekend that it's tiring to just write about it. Just for fun I thought I would included some finishing touches to really add to the visual improvement that will just get better over the next week or so!

New unit at the end of the hallway. Thanks to my Mom!

The Master closet. Finally some organization!

Our new base cabinets huddled together in the middle of the kitchen with the new diswasher

The table light and the pendent lights up and some of the cabinets in place

The Window Swap and Invisible Speakers

In order to make our kitchen all pretty we needed to switch the window over the old kitchen sink with the one in the dinning room. Now, this was a little tricky since in order to switch the windows we had to take them both out. This presented two problems. One: It's cold. Second: We couldn't leave a gaping hole in the side of our house while we weren't there. This meant that we had to work kinda fast. To make life easier Nate took both windows out and boarded up the one to the screen porch so we could focus on the one that opens to the outside.

  

Windows out!

Since we were putting a smaller window in a bigger window and a bigger window in a smaller window hole we had to frame out one window and expand the other.

 After a couple of nights work we had both windows back into place. We're thinking of making one of of the holes under the big window a doggy door since Madeline spent the entire time we were working jumping in and out of the house.

All Done!

 

Nate found these really cool speakers that go in the wall and you plaster over them so that you can't see them at all and they use the walls to sound really good.  Now we can listen to the radio in surround sound! (You can see them now since we haven't plastered over them yet)