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.

Buttoning up the House

I don't know if any one has noticed, but it's gotten COLD. With the cold weather comes the realization that we have been in our house for almost a year. Our goal is to have all current projects done by our 1 year mark so that we can have a little break and do normal people things like sleep and eat. Here is an update on our progress.

Deck: This may not look too different, but all the railings are now on.

 

Front Retaining Wall: Newly painted retaining wall with new cap

Driveway: We were going to seal the driveway this fall but when we went to wash the driveway we noticed a few spots that needed more than just a seal. This resulted in patching those spots but you can't seal over patched areas for 6 months :(

Back Porch: We're getting closer to getting the back porched finished. We're in the process of hanging drywall and are hoping to have that finished by the end of the week

Double insulation on Ceiling

Bead Board on Back wall

We have a new Half Wall!

Miscellaneous Stuff:

New Railing on Side Entrance

New Doors on Laundry Room

Fun Stuff: Here is some random, non house related, things.

This was in toy store window..... it makes me a little sad

These are made out of Soda Bottles for Halloween

Zonked out in costume (Spider Queen and Demon)

I, of course, am not in costume but the dogs are

Warming the House

As the weather starts getting chilly, our chores around the house have tranistioned into what Nate calls "buttoning up" the house. One of these chores was to finally put insulation into the upstairs and attic. Adam was nice enough to spend his day off climbing through our teeny tiny attic laying down insulation.

I don't know if this is clear, but this is Adam up in the attic. It is so small that you have to basically crawl on your belly and you need to not be allergic to fiberglass (I'm still itching). The job took very little time compared to what we thought it would and now we have a comfy, cozy, warm house.

We took out the built ins in Nate's office to access the eaves one side of the house

The insulation project took so little time that we were able to get some other projects done! We had spent most of the summer on the backyard that we had neglected the front yard. One of the major issues was our retaining wall. The cap on the retaining wall was not present when we bought the house and it was obvious that it hadn't been there for awhile. This was causing some issues since the bricks were the type with holes in them and water was getting down in them and during the winter it was freezing and breaking the bricks. Before this happened again this year we wanted to get a cap on the wall. Jill came down and spent her afternoon off helping us lay the caps.

Before cap

After cap

We are also going to stain the brick to give it a more uniform look but we didn't have time for that today.

From the picture above you can see that we got A LOT of stone. Luckily, we made a new purchase for our house that allowed us to get the stone delivered. When we went to Lowe's on Saturday, they had a bunch of appliances out front on clearance for various reasons. One was a stainless steel convection stove, double oven and 5 burner. Basically our dream stove. It had dent on the side that the cabinet hides so they had knocked 600 dollars off the price. However, it was still too much for us so we got what we had gone to the store for, and left. On Sunday, Nate went back to Lowe's to get the insulation and the stove was still there.... AND another $200 had been taken off the price! Once they added a 4 year warranty to the deal we caved. They delivered it today (for free and they delivered the stone for free too ... I think they wanted to get rid of the stove) and now the eye sore of our stove is no more (oh and if anyone wants a working stove let me know)!

Believe it or not, this is not everything we did today. However, I have not gotten pictures of everything yet. Instead, I'll show you some other projects that we've been working on.

New Chalkboard: We have this awesome huge chalkboard that will not fit on any of our walls in our house. Anyone that knows us knows that we can't live without a chalkboard so we had to figure something out. The school Nate worked at this summer happened to have extra slate chalkboards left over and so we compromised and now have two small chalkboards instead of one large one. We have now put one of them up in the kitchen.

New porch roof: Our roof on our house is actually really new. However our porch roof leaked. We figured out that this was because they put the shingles over slated wood instead of plywood. This was starting to be an issue since we are closing up that porch and so we decided to rip the shingles off and do it right. Nate found a 4 day period that was supposed to be really good weather and went to work. He got the old shingles up, the plywood down and the water and ice shield down. Now this shield is made of tar and when the sun hits it, it melts and fills in all the cracks. Nate put it on the entire roof since it's shallow. Now, this is supposed to keep all the water out. The only problem is when it rains a day early and not just rains, but POURS for hours. I woke up Monday morning with it raining in the inside of the porch which, just in case you couldn't guess, is a bad way to start your day and week. Since it had decided to rain early, the tar on the seam between the old and new roof had not had time to seal and so the water was going under the new roof into our porch. After some quick work on Nate's part (with me at work being neurotic and calling every 5 min to figure out what was going on) the water situation was taken care of. Nate finished shingling the roof later that week and we now have a non leaky roof!

OK. I think this post has gotten long enough. Next up: Progress on the back porch

New Deck

Here is a tour of the new deck. It isn't completely finished at this point but it is really close.

Nate is so excited that the grill is officially on the deck

We have Grass!!

New retaining wall and slope instead of stairs

New Plexiglas windows so Nate will have light in his work area

 New steps down into the basement and retaining walls. We also added drainage at the bottom. Now you don't hit your head on the way in and it won't flood!

This may seem like a weird picture but it comes with a story. Nate was using the drill in the back porch and when he put it down on the ladder it fell and managed to hit a can of spray insulation just right to puncture it. This resulted in the spray insulation going every where and in an attempt to get it out of the back porch he threw it outside on the deck. Now we have an insulated deck.

Back porch all insulated

Our little tree in the front with new grass. Now no one will know about the crater!

New mums in the garden

We have updates on the inside as well but I'll save that for the next post. This weekend we are insulating the upstairs so our house will be super warm this winter!