What a difference a year makes

One year ago today, as I write this, we sat down and signed the papers to our house. While we didn't get the keys to the house and start working on it for another three days, this day marks the beginning of a tremendous year of change, not only with our house, but in our lives. While we are not completely finished, and we may not reach our goal of being completely done in a few days, we will be finished within a couple of weeks of working on it for a year. Here is a run down of what we have left to do. Most of this list will be finished tomorrow but we're going to hold out on a black Friday deal on carpet.

clean and seal the deck
trim exterior of kitchen window
plexiglass the side door
seal porch door
paint rest of my office, trim in living room and kitchen, upstairs hallway and back porch
finish kitchen and bathroom cabinet
attach caps on backyard retaining wall
carpet stairs and upstairs hallway

OK. Now that you know what we have to do, I'll show you what we've been doing the past couple of weeks.

The back porch got a huge transformation this week. We finished dry walling and hanging the bead board. Then we did something completely uncharacteristic. We hired someone to come and plaster which is the only person we've hired besides our plumber. It was actually our neighbor who did it and he came in at 4 yesterday and was finished a cleaned up by 7. It was awesome. When we plastered, it took two weeks and it wasn't nearly as good of a job. Now we just have to wait a few days and we can paint. In the mean time, Nate has been putting up the trim.

Look at that Plaster!

Trim up

Trim around door

Our neighbor also took care of the plastering upstairs so now we can finish up there as well.

Nate put a back door on and finished putting in the Plexiglas windows in his work area. He also finished putting together the back retaining wall. I painted the caps to the front retaining wall as well.

 

 We also finally got around to installing a doorbell. When we took the old one off we were pleasantly surprised to see that it was wired in so it wasn't to hard to replace it.