Dost Mine Eyes Deceive Me?

No, they don't.  I'm actually posting!  One for an official "here's something we did" thing, and another will just be a little sneak peek. 

First, if I didn't say so already, the kitchen is completely unpacked and is in full use.  Pantry is cleaned out and sorted (or "sorted"); cabinets are full of utensils (except when Husband unloads the dishwasher and doesn't remember where I told him that the stuff goes, so it just sits on the counter until it magically disappears into its proper location.  Or, more accurate, just gets used and put back in the sink again); and I'm always cooking so the stove looks like a food bomb went off...every day.  Poor Husband (for he is House Husband).  I try, but most of the time, I'm like, "Eff it.  I'll clean it later."  And then later it's just magically clean again.  Must be the gnomes.

The master bathroom has received no actual renovation.  We haphazardly moved the stuff we needed from the living room into the bathroom (towels, bathroom products, etc), but it just ends up finding its resting place on the toilet we have yet to install upstairs.  The master vanity was used as a holding place for renovation materials, bathroom storage, and probably rat skeletons (I call him Skippy), while the very small powder room was being used as our primary getting-ready area.  However, given that the powder room is a) small and b) also contains the toilet, I got fed up a few weekends ago, and cleaned off all the crap items crap off the counters in the main area and decided we'd actually use the master vanity for its intended purpose: Having two people able to use an area at once to get ready.

There's not much to show, really, since this is just a temporary situation.  However, I took the mirror that is supposed to go in the powder room and gave it a temporary home in the main bathroom area.  I cannot describe to you how much that small of a mirror opens up this area.  (It's actually a large mirror - the mirror we will have to buy is going to be around 5 feet wide.)  Then I just cleaned up the rest of the area and moved our daily toiletries to the main area. 

Tada, or whatever.

It's a huge improvement over how it used to look, trust me.

In other news, Husband replaced the door to the bedroom (if by "replace" you mean, remove the door that was leaning up against this area and blocking it from our path, and actually installing a new door that wasn't falling apart).  We already had to remove the trim to put the granite in, so it's not that pretty.  Sigh.  But it will make it easier to paint this area without having to worry about painting around the trim, so I am Ms. Bright Side!

However, while this is technically considered a progression in renovation, installing this door has actually set us back.  Because installing the door meant tearing off the trim to the bedroom side as well, and motherf#$!, because I just painted it.  Grrrr.

I will attempt to maintain my calm.  Not successfully.

...

Onward to part two of my post: SNEAK PEEK!!!

Let's pretend that the area around the new (waiting-to-be-planted) pansies and Cast Irons isn't horrifying.  It will require extensive pruning, sweeping, and digging.  But I will have a SUPERAWESOME DUO helping me out!!!!!

I hope they're not looking at this picture, because they may rescind their invitation to help. 

Gulp.

But (hopefully) seriously!  I have the parents coming into town this weekend, and I'm totally going to put them to work.  Muhahahaha!!  They have offered to help me "plant some stuff in the front yard" which in their language probably meant "plant some stuff in the front yard", but to me meant "pull weeds, dig up gross ground, pour new soil, plant, and mulch." 

Moms can't read the internet, right?

Crap, I think they can.

Ride On This Magic Carpet!

No, I'm not about to break out with an Aladdin song.  We got our carpet in!

Carpet isn't really a before-and-after thing.  Every overall shot shows a nice even carpet in all the rooms, so you can't really tell why we'd replace it.  The downstairs was okay (except for the murder stains and/or blood-red paint dotting the carpet), if a little...I dunno.  The color was just meh.  It didn't match the paint I put on it, but it similarly didn't not match (thank god we didn't have cranberry colored carpets or anything).  Picture of before?  Yes.

We chose a slightly darker, warmer, richer color for our bedroom.  It's not a remarkable change, but it overall fits in the room so much better.  :)  Wanna see?

Blurry McBlur pic!  Yeesh.  Here is a pic of the closet, which you can tell the color more:

It's such an inviting color.  I can already imagine how gorgeous the finished product will be once we have furniture and a new (read: matching) bedspread set in the room.  :)

For those that care, here's a close up (before and after) of the carpet colors:

Before

Now!

It also looks great next to the bathroom tile!  Here's the doorway between the master bath and the master bedroom:

The upstairs looks great too!  We chose a lighter shade than we did for the master bedroom, but the same carpet brand and quality.  We mostly just needed an update to the upstairs bedrooms because it was clear that there used to be kids up there.  The old carpet had old candy stuck into it, paint stains, and random black stains in both rooms.  Additionally, it was clear that they had added carpets to the rooms but not the hallways, because there was a visible cut at the doorway lines that I always hate.  Now?

Guest bedroom

Office/Nursery

Hallway (clearly)

Stairs

It's a marginally darker color than it used to be, but it's such a seamless finish now (no more carpet cut marks!) and it's softer and better quality than the old stuff.

So...it's over!  No more renovators coming over!  Now it's back in our hands. 

First up on the list?  Move everything back in the rooms, and clean the insides of the kitchen cabinets and pantry (the silica dust seeped in), put down some liner, and start unpacking!  I'm anxious to start actually cooking again, and using real plates and glasses and silverware. 

Then it's a long list of stuff to do after that.  I imagine we'll be taking it slower, since these last seven weeks have been a flurry of do-do-do.  We've been really enjoying just coming home after work and cuddling up with a movie.  :)

Fan the Flames

So while I didn't end up working this weekend (thankfully, nothing came up!  Whoo!), our visitors from out of town made it impossible to do any housework.  Even after they took off, we lazed about because we were exhausted from the Go-Go-Go of the weekend, so the only real work we did was install our new fan in the master bedroom.  This is the before:

Blech.


This (as always) was more difficult than just removing the old and installing the new, and I will itemize the reasons:

1) The original fan was not installed in the middle of the ceiling.  In fact, it was installed two inches diagonal to the center of the room, so it was doubly-off-center.  Why?  There was a patched spot where it clearly used to be (in the center).  There was also another brown spot where it looks like they originally tried to install it, then said "eff it".


The large brown spot is where it used to be.

2) Because of these random patches, husband decided to go trolling through the attic to determine why it was installed there (was there a stud missing?  Was there an electrical box issue?  Was there an AC unit in the way?  Were the previous owners frightened by a squirrel that was presently occupying the space where it needed to be installed?).  The answer was no.  There was no reason why it was installed in its present location.  Sigh.
3) Now that the decision was made to move the fan to the center of the room (i.e., where it's supposed to go, McLazies!), I had to patch up the previous holes.  I like spackle!  Especially because it's pink.  Plus I am a fan of things that change colors.
4) We do remember the ceiling detexturizing debacle of May 2011, right?  Well, as you can see, the ceiling texture was not removed from the ceiling itself, because a) I couldn't reach it at the time and b) there was a ceiling fan in the way.  Now, there was no excuse. So I became a detexturizing, ceiling painting fool.  It was actually quite comical, because while I was doing this, husband was drilling holes into the ceiling so...you can imagine how that went.  I had ceiling in my eyeballs and hair for the remainder of the evening. 

So here's what it looked like when we were done with the prep-work.

Before everything had dried, clearly.

And....the epic finale!  Here's what it looks like now:

Modern, chic, and centered (though it doesn't look like it from this angle on the bed). What more could you ask for?  Nothing, because this fan is gorg.

And the Move Rolls On

So...I realize I haven't updated in forever.  I'm sorry about that, but there's just been so much to do, both on the house and the apartment.  Chief on that list is packing for The Official Move, which we'd planned for this past weekend.  The problem was, there was a lot of other stuff in our lives that we had to do, so packing kept getting moved down to the bottom of the list.  I didn't want to pack up the kitchen and drag all the stuff over if I was still going to be painting and such (and de-texturing the ceiling, and more painting, and then more painting on top of that, and then having to install shelf liner).  There were a lot of items we couldn't move over yet, for myriad reasons.  But since the internet was set to start on Friday, we decided we'd start our move then. 

Except...Friday was kind of a horrid work day, and husband informs me that he has to work on his car Saturday since that's the only day he'll have help, so...we planned on me packing Friday, working on the house Saturday, then joining up Saturday late afternoon for dinner and a subsequent nap, then waking up in the evening and moving stuff over.  Except it was only going to be the important stuff (like the TV and clothes), because there is another reason:

I may not have blogged it out, but husband is like, ubermechanic.  He is the McGuyver of cars/mechanical items.  He has some guy for whom he is working on a car, and it turns out the guy is a remodeling company owner.  So...they are sort of working out this deal to fix everything we want in the house in exchange for husband-labor.  Awesome.  So...we don't really want to go through all the trouble of moving everything upstairs and into the living room, if the living room and upstairs are getting new carpet/wood, yanno?  We can't really move everything into the garage because one side is housing my Engagement Muscle Car, and the other side is housing...all the home renovation stuff for the bathroom.  No extra room.  For serious.  And PS - this guy was supposed to have been at the house measuring and preparing for installation like, two weeks ago.  The point was to redo the kitchen and the flooring before we moved in, so we didn't have to try to go through all this drama post-move.  But as is the way of contractors in general, he's only just now measuring (as in, he came by today).  Sigh. 

I will blog about our efforts in another post, but I will continue story!  So Friday I packed, Saturday I did trim-work on the kitchen, and some other stuff I've completely forgotten about at this point.  Then husband came home and we had tasty food before napping and beginning our move.  We got finished moving everything in around 11PM, then I started working on putting the fixtures back on the walls in the bedroom while husband put the bed together and set up the TV stuff (having a husband rocks).  We collaborated on putting the blinds back on the bedroom window (because you know we didn't want to be woken up at 7am by the sun, unfiltered as it would have been.  Sun = Evil when working on a house until 2am).  Then husband began his efforts for setting up the internet. 

Yeah.  That didn't go well.

They were supposed to transfer service.  So when on Friday, the internet went out at the apartment, we both assumed that it went on at the house.  Except, no.  After husband went trolling through the attic at midnight and cursing up a storm (it was not pretty) and then went outside to check the box (at nearly 1am, in the dark, with only his cell-phone light to guide him), and I (calmly) went plugging in the DSL box at every available port (to no avail), we came to the conclusion that either the internet guy did something wrong, or we had porting issues (much bigger issue). 

In the effort of continuing the (awesome) story: husband gets on the phone today.  After hours of being transferred back and forth with AT&T, he has discovered that Mr. Internet Tech wanted to get off a few hours early on Friday.  So, despite having told husband that we didn't have to be at the house to turn the service on, he took one half-arsed sweep of the front of the house, couldn't find the box, and decided, "WTF.  I guess I'll just go home." 

...

Wait, what?

Yes.  So we didn't have service all weekend, at either house, because the tech guy was supremely lazy in addition to being a blatant liar.  And husband gets probably the most ghetto "ladies" (loosely-termed) on the phone today to tell him that no one will come out until Wednesday at the earliest.

Now, husband and I have a good-cop, bad-cop vibe.  I play the understanding, reasonable, level-headed voice of reason.  He plays the "I'm gonna come to your house and chop of your limbs if you don't deliver what you told me you'd deliver under the terms and conditions we agreed upon" hot-head.  It's actually perfect when we work together to fight crime and purchase refrigerators.  However, when he is tasked with speaking with AT&T reps without me?  Things generally don't end well.  And, now that he's armed with the info that the lazy tech blatantly lied to him?  I can only imagine how that conversation went down.  Were I present, it would likely have been enormously entertaining or uncomfortable to behold.  Possibly both.

Short version, after five hours on the phone, he managed to get a tech out today.  That's probably best for all involved.

Back to Sunday!  I painted the ceiling, fixed all my green-paint-on-the-ceiling accidents, and put the last shot of trim on the entire kitchen.  I do not have a reveal picture, because all I have left is touch-ups with the green tonight, and the kitchen will be done!  Yes!!  Reveal pics tomorrow. 

Husband got a friend (the aforementioned DIY-kitchen-remodeler who also just finished completely remodeling his bath into a shower as well) came over to help with the bathroom.  Namely, I convinced husband to install dual shower-heads in the master bath.  HECKYES!!!!!!!  So there was like, soldering, and pipe-purchasing, and other stuff.  Oh, and we finally installed a (temporary) mailbox, so now we may receive mail.  Yes! 

SO, in summary:  We are only partially moved in.  We won't have internet until this afternoon.  We won't have gas in the house (meaning, we won't have hot water for showers) until later this week. So there's going to be a lot of back-and-forth to the apartment for showers/packing/moving over the next week.  Boo/Yay.  But we can now receive mail and we have a supercomfortable bed with a superawesome TV and PS3 and the house is sloooowly starting to come together!!!!

Renovation Marathon

So…Saturday, I received a surprise.  I woke up and worked (SHOCKING), and I received a little chat message from my bestie.   I’d been badgering her to come and help me out with the house, despite that she lived three hours away from me.  Her family are like, house-renovatey people (technical term) and she’s probably the most amazing person on the planet and every, time I’m like, “House make angry!” she’s like, “Hey, how about do that thing that’s totally easy that you never thought of before” and then I’m like “OMG I love you a whole bunches of lots.  Please move in with me and live here forever”, and she’s like “No” and then I’m like “But…but…!!!!!!!” but she won’t listen. 

So anyway, she says that she’s coming to help me.  LIKE, FROM A THREE-HOUR-AWAY LOCATION.  She’s packing up her husband and she’s driving to help out, ON SATURDAY. Squees ensue to a dog-barking-pitch.  I bounce.  I titter with glee. 

I get to the home to slap on a second coat of trim-paint, all the while whistling while I work.  I’m stupid-excited, y’all.  And how could I not be?:

Look at that face.  What’s not to get stupid-excited over?  Exactly.

So I finish the bedroom before they show up.  Touched up the walls, last coat of paint put on the window sill/baseboards/trim!  I am glee.  Would you like to see it?  Okay!  Total before and after!!!

Before (Sorry Sue!)

After!  (Without fixtures re-put on)

It's like a different room, amirite?

It's gorgeous.  I'm so excited it's over!  Now all I have to do is finish painting the doors (see pics below), clean up and reattach the outlet covers, put the blinds back in, and put in the new air duct cover we bought and...it's move-in ready!  After eight days.  Y'all, I cannot tell you how big a relief it is.

I have a sidenote topic regarding taping that I will discuss in a separate post.

So anyway, after being done with the bedroom, I don’t want to start on The Next Big Project (read: kitchen) because I’ll be all, in the middle of it and they will be coming over and then we will be wanting to eat the food at the restaurant (and celebrate, because HOLY ACCOMPLISHMENT BATMAN!), so…I just dug at the backyard philodendron more (sigh) and waited for them to arrive.

After the long tour of the home, and the Mexican-food-and-margarita-pitcher break, we split up.  The womenz go to the Wal-Mart for supplies, the boyz go to the apartment for the beds/sheets/etc.  Amanda has decreed that we will have marathon house-renovatin’, and therefore will sleep at the house this evening and work until our tired arms and legs can no longer sustain us, crash out on our beds, and be promptly woken up the next morning by this:

What I was threatened with.

So...we gals return home with supplies (including energy drinks) and begin prepping the kitchen.  Amanda starts on the taping and I start on the ceiling.  (Oh yes.  The ceiling.)  I am briefly attacked by a very aggressive (but tinier than my pinky-nail) little house spider which launches himself off the ceiling and onto me in an attempt to, I dunno, perhaps kamikazi-bomb me?  Who knows.  He is unsuccessful, and falls to the ground, where he promptly remains in the same location (stunned, no doubt) until I accidentally step on him later.  Oops.

The boys return to the house with their bounties and, after unloading, I put Drew (the other husband) on wall-sanding duty.

Why such a blurry shot, you ask?  Probably because my shoulder/arm muscles were spasming involunarily from all the ceiling-texture-removin' I was doing.  Or maybe it was latent trauma from the suicide spider-bomber.  Whichever.

Husband rescues me, giving me the opportunity to photograph the awesomeness of our marathon-renovation.



The fruits of Drew's labor.

The haze you're seeing is ceiling dust.  Oh yes.  And possibly wall-dust as well.

The boys were so helpful!  Of course, we also had other items to help propel us into action for the long night:

Winning!

Once complete, the boys disappeared into the bathroom for full-on Demolition Mode while the ladies painted.

Yes, that is a garden tub on its side.

In addition to this awesome work, they found us a souvenir.

Fully. Intact. Rat. Carcass.  Amazing!!!  *fist pump*  It was, as all of my newfound friends in this house, destroyed soon after.  Someone beheaded it with an errant foot.  Le sigh.

So this progress kept us up until 3am, when we all promptly crashed.  I have a vague memory of halfheartedly putting a sheet over the mattress and then just falling asleep.  That is all. 

Shockingly, I was not awoken to any drill sargeants on Sunday.  I think someone was as sleepy as we were.  :)

After we drug ourselves out of bed and put food in our bellies, it was back to work.  Amanda tackled cleaning and taping all of the baseboards, while I put the second coat of paint on the kitchen walls. 

Witness the paint on her!  Adorablest Person Ever.

Husband and Drew cleared out a lot of the debris from the master bath and then husband came to me with the news that we'd be very quickly replacing our water heater.  Sigh.

So they were gone forever, and they came back with a shiny new one.  Then they had to build a new house for it, I guess. 

Wooden housey thing, lovingly built by husband's adept hands.

There was a lot of banging and sawing and grunting and other manly noises.  I'm pretty sure they didn't come from Amanda, so....yeah.  This is what it looks like now!

Moldy-Insulation-No-More!

The top of the master-bath-area

He also purchased new insulation, sheetrock, etc for the bath. We won't discuss price.

It waned into the evening, and sadly the crew had to drive back home.  But Amanda had to pose on my engagement car (and I'm sure she humped it at one point too) before leaving:

Thank you to the best helpers ever!!!  Y'all are awesome.

I am sad to notify you that I do not have an after picture of the kitchen presently.  Cry me a river.  But two coats were painted on it, as well as four coats of paint in the pantry, and that sucker looks goooooood.  Like, awesomegood.  After I put some coats of shiny stuff on the trim, I will take pictures.  Speaking of kitchen, husband and I are scheduled to pick out granite Thursday, so hopefully it should be a full-on after shot here soon.

Fridges and Fringes

Thursday, I put a second coat of ceiling paint on the trim and the interiors of the windows after work.  Friday was Fridge Installation Day, so I rushed home after work to meet husband, who was continuing to demolish the formerly-known-as-bathtub. See his handwork:



Welcome to Mold Town: Population 3,982,213,103,492 mold spores.

I worked on (finally!) finishing up the bedroom trim so we could (finally!) move in officially.  When I heard the doorbell ring, I resisted my childlike urge to run screaming into the living room to see my new toy.  I fought it like four times, y’all.  I wanted to wait and see it installed for the full effect.  But somehow the bedroom trim got taped and painted (first coat) extremely quickly for some reason…dunno how that happened.

PS, do not do what I did.  I saw that the McLazies had blatantly painted the red paint over the baseboards, so I didn’t bother trying to tape them.  But what I ended up getting was this look:

Painting Fail

Not hot.  The first coat of trim wasn’t exactly providing coverage, ifyouknowwhatimean.  Lesson learned. 

I also discovered that either a) someone was brutally murdered in the master bedroom or, b) the McLazies didn’t bother to put down drop cloths down when they painted.  I’ll let you decide:

I suspect the red room was a cover-up for the blood stains.

So anyway, 35 minutes and first coat of trim paint later, I calmly walked (read: bounced, jogged, skipped) into the kitchen to see….

Not installed, sir.  While I like this angle on my husband, it was not the finished product I was expecting to see.  Reason for delay?  The fridge was just a titch too large.  Husband’s strategy was to remove the baseboards from this area.  The baseboards I was painting (twice) when I met Mr. Fiddles.  The baseboards that I angrily cursed the names of the McLazies for splattering magenta paint all over, and that I subsequently made gorgeous with my awesome painting skills.  Gone. 

Before (homage to Mr. Fiddles and the box which previously held him)

No more baseboards!

My sadness was short-lived when I got to see this:

You are not in some surreal dream.  That's a double-drawer of freezer goodness.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Husband, after seeing my reversion to a twirling six-year-old girl in the kitchen, pondered that perhaps he should have purchased me a French-door fridge instead of a muscle car for my engagement present.  Being a true pragmatist, I should have suggested the wiseness of purchasing both to ensure I would agree to the marital arrangement.  He was lucky that I was so wooed by him at the time that I agreed to only the muscle-car-of-awesome. 

Anyway.  Here is me next to my newest present.  



Welcome to another episode of The Price is Right.

 And it totally WAS right!!  Better than right.  I love my husband.

Before we left for the night (I was exhausted, y'all.), I was made aware of one more awesome addition to our home:




Ain't it adorable?!

 We have outdoor lighting now!  And it's really bright-awesome.  It apparently goes around the sides of the house too, so take that, would-be intruders!