Madeline's Castle!: 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!