Like the Energizer Bunny, we're still going...

Lots of stuff getting done– it is almost seeming like we’re going to finish! :)

I’m pretty much done with the wiring project, and Rachel finished pulling up all the carpet, and moved the refuse to the garage. Evan and Scot came over and helped us move the huge built-in stuff from the living room to the garage, where it will actually be a useful storage center. I had to pull out the old shelves that were on one wall in the garage to make room, but it was worth it: this gives us some nice closed-off storage in the garage to keep camping gear in.

With the carpet up, we could start painting. We are going with a deep red in the living/dining room and in the kitchen. The walls were white before, so we knew we had our work cut out for us on the painting side. Nathan and Emily came over to help out, which made things go a LOT faster. While Rachel cleaned the cabinets in the kitchen, Emily painted the all the doors and the inside of the kitchen cabinets, and Nathan and I did the huge celing in the living room and dining room. We put up two coats of an excellent putty color, and it looked GREAT. We then moved on to priming the walls. In order to make the dramatic color change from white to red go a little quicker, we tinted the primer with some of the paint… this meant that, for a time, the entire space was BRIGHT PINK. It was AWFUL. We have pictures of the room, which Nate had taken to calling “Rachel and Joe’s Malibu Dream House.” Scary stuff.

The next day Rachel and Emily were off to Kameron’s baby shower, which left Nate and I alone to put a couple coats of the red paint in the living room and dining room, as well as putting the first coat on the kitchen celing. Good stuff… it is really starting to look like the house we envisioned.

Rach and I both pretty much took the day off home improvement stuff today… the only exception was that the Happy Hauler came by to pick up all the old carpet, and the old appliances. These guys are really cool– I’ve used them before. They are totally friendly guys, and very efficient workers. An absolute pleasure to do business with. It was nice to have our garage back– it had become overrun with garbage from all the stuff we were pulling out.

I mentioned the hardwood floor would need to be refinished before. I wanted to provide a little more detail on that. Basically, there are a lot of pretty deep scratches and even some minor water damaged areas in the floor that would need to be fixed before we can move in. Additionally, there is an entire section of the floor by the entry that is just particle board underlayment instead of hardwood, and a section that is a single huge plank where a wall was taken out. I can fix the area with the big plank, but the are with the particle board is just too oddly shaped to fix well, and having an obvious area where new floor meets old floor would just be weird. Rach and I talked about it, and I think we’re going to go with a nice tile entry, and pick up the same tile around the fireplace to tie things together. I’m pretty confident that it is the right thing to do, as it never would have looked right if I had tried to repair the floor in such a conspicuous place. We’ve tentatively selected a beautiful stone tile that we both like. It coordinates nicely with the colors in the area, and we’re thinking about taking on a somewhat elaborate (but subtle) tile border that would look really cool. We picked up some samples at Lowes today, and we’re going to give it a couple days.

Tomorrow the exterminator is coming, so we have to steer clear of the house for most of the day, which will give me more time to catch up on work. This is “a good thing.” :)

More info to come!