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)

The Plan

Now that the wall is down in the kitchen, we really can see what sort of space we have. This allowed us to layout what we wanted to do with the kitchen. After drawing on the walls and taping off the floor we had a plan. Nate used his fancy planning program to show what it will hopefully look like.

 

 This is a general idea of what the kitchen will look like. (Our fridge is not nearly as nice). We are modifying a large dresser that was left in our basement for the island and Nate found a butcher block top for $30 bucks on Craigslist! (We love Craigslist). We are able to use a lot of the cabinets from the old kitchen so we only need to buy about 3 to complete the kitchen area. We were also able to do our first price match at Lowe's! We found out that even if they have to special order the product they will still price match they just won't give you the 10% discount. However, if you are really nice they will let you keep looking for a lower price until the whatever you bought comes in. So I have 3 weeks to find a lower price on our new dishwasher. The only thing we need to get is a new hood, possibly a new stove and the countertops. 

Before we can put all our nice new stuff in our kitchen we have to do a few things. First is that we have to switch the window in the old kitchen and the window in the new kitchen so that the cabinets fit in. Second is that we have to do something with the floors since the old kitchen had two layers of laminate. This means we have to decide between wood or tile. There are pros and cons with both and we keep flip flopping on what we want. Pros for wood: the new kitchen already has the wood floors since it was the dinning room and we can pull wood from other parts of the house to put in the old kitchen so we would have to buy very little. It is also a warmer floor option. Cons: wood in kitchens sometimes does not hold up as well and we would have to take out some from the dining room side so that the floor is seamless. Pros to tile: Holds up well and I've gotten really good at putting it down. Cons: Cold and it would cost a lot more to put it in. The third thing we have to do, which is really the next thing we need to do before anything else, is do all the electrical and put can lights in. Hopefully this will all be done in two months!

Window Window in our Tub

I did not include this with the rest of the bathroom due to the pain that went into figuring out what to do with it. I have been in many houses and even lived in a few with the bathroom window in the tub area. Therefore, I had never really thought of the difficulties of having a window in the tub. Now, with these older houses this apparently didn't originally present a problem. This is because it used to be that people only took baths. However, now that people take showers having a window right in the water line is a pain in the butt. (Hence our missing sill and mold throughout that wall). Our first idea? Go to Lowe's and ask. We had some ideas that we thought might work so we headed over to the store and presented our conundrum. The guy listened, scoffed, and said "take it out". While that was technically advice it wasn't terribly helpful to us so we had to get a little creative.

Problem number 1: What to use for the sill?
So the natural choice for a window sill is wood. Wood is not so good with water however so we needed something else. On an unrelated trip to the store, we happened to be in the tile cutting area and sitting there like it was waiting for us was a display of marble. They came in different lengths and widths perfect for window sills. We were also lucky enough to find a guy at Lowe's who was willing and able to make some questionable cut in the marble so that it would actually look like a sill. (We had previously delt with someone who was very unwilling to even do a simple cut in normal tile). So problem #1 solved. We had a sill that wouldn't fall apart with water. To make sure that water didn't pool on the sill we installed it at an angle.

Problem number 2: How to frame out the window?
There were a couple of problems associated with this. The first was that we didn't really think about how we were going to frame the window before we tiled. Because of this, we really didn't leave enough room to use tile as the frame and so we had to find something else that was waterproof. This was solved by finding this cool trim that looks like white wood trim, cuts like wood but is actually a plastic material. So, now we had the trim but how do we attach it? I had tiled right up to the edge of the window so we couldn't nail it in. Also, since the house is 50 or so years old, nothing is perfectly square anymore. So Nate got out his handy dandy tools and cut and trimmed until the rectangular pieces fit to frame the window and the trim could be nailed to the trim. We also used caulk behind the trim and in the seams to make it as waterproof as possible and it finally looked like a finished window!

Problem number 3: Privacy

So the last issue we had with the window in the tub was the fact that it faced our neighbors window and it was in our tub and it was a very clear and the perfect height to give a show to anyone who happened to glance over. Since I am really not a fan of having a curtain in the shower, we once again headed over to Lowe's to investigate a solution. We found two very viable options. The first is basically a stick on frost of the glass. For our window that would have run about 25 dollars. While a good option, option #2 was a lot cheaper. For about 3 bucks you can get a can of spray paint that frosts the glass and doesn't paint it. Besides the cost benefit, it also comes off with a little acetone so we can change it if we want to. Some things about it that aren't as nice are that if you don't follow the directions to keep it at least a foot away from the window then drips form. This isn't really noticeable as long as you don't try to fix it which of course I did. It's like when you try to cut your own bangs for the first time and they don't come out even so you trim a little more... then a little more until you're left with these really short hairs that stick straight out from your forehead. Anyway, I've been told that it's not noticeable, but it definitely is not completely smooth. the great thing is that we now have a private shower that does not require a curtain.

Lesson learned? When building a bathroom, try your absolute hardest to not but a window in the tub.

 

For prosperity sake I thought I would include in this post the finished bathroom with all the accessories.

 

The wall comes down!

This weekend was big for the house. Not only was it move-in part I, but we also took down the wall between the kitchen and dinning room. Last week we took out all the cabinets in the kitchen and so the kitchen was transformed from this:

 

to this:

 

Top Left is where the fridge used to be, top right is where the sink used to be and bottom is

where the stove used to be

Now where did all those cabinets go you ask? Well they are all being saved to be used in our new kitchen so they are currently completely filling up the three season porch along with the stove and dishwasher. Once all the cabinets were down we had to make sure that there was no electricity running through the wall we were going to take down. So while Nate and Tom worked on rewiring and disconnecting and such, Nate's mom and I worked on getting all the dust off the walls from when we sanded the floors. This proved to be a more irritating process than expected. Even after vacuuming and wiping the walls down, they still have dust on them. At this point I'm just hoping it eventually wears off. Anyway, after the dust was kinda off, I was able to touch up the paint at which point we were ready to move in! This part of the move in was minimal. Since we still have a little bit of trim to finish up we mainly moved into the bedroom so that the bed could be out of the way for the work we were doing on the other side of the house. This allowed also the possibility for us to start spending nights at the house.

First we brought in our new rug:

 

 

This is the first rug I've ever bought that has a pattern on it. Next came the bed frame.

 

Finally the new mattress!

 

 

This is what it looks like with the bed made and temporary curtains up.

 

We took a pause for Valentine's day

 

Pretty roses from Nate!

and were right back to work again this morning (Yay for three day weekends). Today was the day the wall came down! We've been waiting for this day for a long time since we were having a really hard time visualizing what sort of space we were going to be able to work with for the new kitchen.

  

 

Before the wall came down

 

 

Working hard to get all of the wall frame out of the ceiling

 
                                   View from dinning room                                View from doorway to living room

 

We were completely amazed on how big the space was once we got the wall down. The ceiling looks so tall and it really feels like we've gained a lot of square footage. Next step: Clean up!

Floors

We were lucky enough to find a house that has hardwood floors throughout the entire house minus a small section of the kitchen. Unfortunately, they were in pretty rough shape. They had dog stains and a lot of scratches in them. Therefore we decided to refinish them as the final big project on the first half of the house. I had developed a lovely head cold so while I was curled up on the couch, Nate rented a floor sander and edger and he and Adam went to town on the floors. Now this is a very tiring messy job. After many hours, aching backs and dust covered walls, the boys turned the floors from this:

 

 To this:

 

    
 

Now came my turn. Because of the stains and scratches we decided to go with a dark stain. I learned some interesting things while learning how to stain floors. First is that staining floors is similar but different from staining other things. Second, if you are going to use a dark stain you want to "pop" the wood before you stain. This consists of geting the sanded wood (after you clean up all the dust) wet. I did this but using a garden sprayer and lightly spraying the wood and letting it dry. Thirdly, you do not have to be on your hands and knees with a rag to stain floors. They make a fuzzy pad thing that attaches to the end of a painter pole that you can dip in the stain and spread on the floor (always with the grain!). The last thing I learned is that you want to keep a wet edge. This means that you want to stain an entire length of the room and then come back along the same edge and repeat until the entire room is done. 

 

After first coat of stain

 

After the first coat of stain we did a second coat to even out the color. We also put a coat of polyurethane 

 

After this we did a light sanding and then another coat of polyurethane. This last coat needs to be really hard so you have to wait a whole week before walking on it or moving any furniture on it. That means this Sunday we can finally move our bed and new mattress in! Stay tuned for move in part one!