Big Girl Room

Our biggest project so far has been improving one of the bedrooms on the 2nd floor. And of course its for babygirl. So I mentioned beadboard in the last post. First I'll start with before photos:

So after we pulled up the carpet the room wasn't too bad. But the old plaster walls are so dingy and uneven and like I said before, I had my heart set on beadboard. So my Dad and hubby got to work, cutting and gluing/nailing the sheets to the walls. The walls were so uneven we used a tub of liquid nails per sheet! Nothing was even or level so it required a lot of attention to detail. After a couple re-dos, the boys did a fantastic job.













After Dad headed back to VA, Hubby was left with painting. Like everything else we've done so far, it took 5x longer and 3x as much paint as we thought. Here he is in progress:















As you can see, I picked a light bright blue above the beadboard and a soft green for the ceiling. We still want to add crown molding to really finish it off, but after all the other trim work, this should be a piece of cake. And here is the semi-finished product:

Thanks to our model Reggie. Obviously I still need curtains, a rug, accessories and artwork. Grammy is working on a custom bedskirt to match the bedding. But the heavy duty work is done! I'll post finished pics when we get it pulled together.

Whoa Double Rainbow!

So it's been a few weeks since we've posted. I hope we haven't disappointed the nine people who actually read this thing, but home improvement for some reason has lost a little of its mojo. Call it the "sophomore slump", or when a rookie "hits the wall", whatever it is we've hit it. We still love the house, but the excitement of "hell yeah, we own a house!" has turned into "oh shit, we own a house!"

Wife has some posts she's working on and they'll be up soon, but the highlight for me since the toilet installation was absolutely the electrical work we had done. We hired this great guy named Harry Anderson, who played in a friend of a colleague's band, to fix all the fire hazards identified from the housing inspector and to boost our service to 200 amps from the 60 amps we had. Don't ask me what any of that means. The best part of Harry's work was his installation of two strategic outlets in our living room. First he put an outlet behind the TV, so now Babygirl can't yank the extension cord running across the room out of the wall right as Clinton Kelly is about to tell whether to match your socks to your shoes or pants! Better still, he installed another outlet so I could hook up my stereo.

Babygirl was at daycare that day, so I spent the afternoon wiring my speakers and connecting all my components. I finished hooking in up and threw on some Neil Young and it was just me and the dogs, in my new house. I don't know what it was, the plaster walls, the hardwood floors, or the sleep deprivation, but my stereo sounded incredible. I was having a Double Rainbow moment. After a few songs, the wife and Babygirl arrived and for the first time I really felt the joy of owning a home, the American Dream: thirty years of mortgage payments, leaky toilets, endless hours of yard work, but fuck it I could play my stereo as loud as I wanted and it sounded beautiful and my wife is beautiful and my beautiful daughter was dancing with me in our new house.

Double Rainbow, all the way!

Status Update

Hello Dear readers! It has been awhile and I've really started slacking on the posts. But only because things have been busy around here... We've done a lot of small projects and they are not super exciting but here is a quick rundown:

1. We bought a new stove. I forgot to snap a picture when it was brand new and since I'm not known to be a clean cook, it could use a good scrub down. For now I'll post a sample online photo instead. We actually bought this not too long after move in, so its sort of old news now, but since its one of the best things about our kitchen I want to give it proper credit. We are planning to put in a new dishwasher and then after that just live with the old kitchen (imagine bad linoleum, oak cabinets, and blue laminate counters) until we get to do a full renovation of the space. The kitchen is pretty large and with great new appliances it functions well so we can live with it for now. We also have to give a shout out to Grammy for the new fridge. She volunteered to help clean at move in and promptly offered to replace the fridge as our housewarming gift. The previous one was that bad!

2. Pruning. The previous owner let the natural elements take over the lot so we did some tree trimming, removed some tree stumps (left by previous owner) and cut back all the brush from around the front and sides of the house. We haven't done any landscaping (yet) but just reclaiming the yard helped a lot. In the process we discovered that our yard has been home to a large colony of snakes, we've found five so far... I'm freaking but I did my research and found out they are harmless. I still don't want them around but I'm hoping now that we've bulldozed their habitat down to the ground they will move on. (PS the "we" referenced above = husband)

3. My Dad came out and spent two weeks helping get things in order. So much was accomplished, I can't even begin to thank him. I couldn't take time off work so the boys were on their own to manage the house, keep the baby and get stuff done. I can't believe they survived. First, we started by painting the nursery. Babygirl was previously set up in the front room until this could happen. The goal was to have the nursery painted and get her moved in before my Dad arrived but it didn't quite happen. Apparently plaster walls suck up paint so a tiny room required two coats of primer plus two coats (of white!) paint and numerous return trips to the paint store to purchase additional quantities. So Pap showed up and helped to knock out the paint project, move in the furniture and hang the curtains. I still want to do a few things to spruce up the space for the new baby so I'll save pics for a future blog...

The next project to tackle was the front bedroom which will be the "big girl room". I had my heart set on beadboard and even though it was costly, a pain in butt to install and no one could quite see the point, everyone humored me. I guess that is the beauty of being pregnant during home renovations. The job is finally done and every agrees it turned out great. I'll give it proper credit in its own post... up next.