Before and After Pics

This may take a few posts, but I'm going to post some before and after pictures of the rooms we have finished.

The living room BEFORE.





























The living room AFTER.





























This is the kitchen AFTER.














The color on the walls is called French Bistro - better known to the men in my family as "institutional green". Whatever, I like it. I was agonizing over what color to paint the wall behind the fireplace. I couldn't leave it red and we primed it for white but it just didn't feel right. Then my cousin came in and said, "You need to paint that brown, like mint chocolate chip." Ding!! He was absolutely correct. Without thinking twice, I bought the paint and we did it. It is perfect with the walls and our furniture, plus it brings out the marble around the fireplace and the dark kitchen floor.



The curtains tied all of the shades of green together with the brown. I very much wanted to keep the green cabinets in the kitchen, and these curtains made it possible. We didn't update the kitchen at all except to paint the walls. We will tile the counters and floor in the future, but I wasn't ready for that just yet.

I LOVE the living room and kitchen. It's very homey and cozy.

All Moved In

We have painted and scrubbed and vacuumed until I could lose my mind, but we moved into the house over Memorial weekend. We've been hanging curtains and pictures and doing general organizational stuff. The air conditioner quit working the first night we stayed there, so we had to have that fixed and found out that we need to replace the unit. That will have to wait a while, if at all possible.

There's still a huge list of stuff we won't to do and money we want to spend :), but I'm happy to be in now. I'll take pictures to post this weekend so everyone can see before and after.

Last Week's Progress

After a few painting parties and a few solo endeavors, the kitchen/den area is almost complete. We (very collective “we”) have painted the laundry room, den/kitchen, and back hallway. The only remaining painting in those rooms is a second coat on the accent wall behind the fireplace (Which is chocolate brown! I’m so excited!) and a second coat on the carport door.

Daddy and Dave installed the new light fixtures in the kitchen yesterday, and they look fantastic! We went with large round fluorescent fixtures to cover the holes where the recessed lights were and to provide more light. One thing about this house that bothers me is that the lighting is dim or non-existent in some rooms. We are rectifying that problem one room at a time. I’m planning to put a fluorescent light in the laundry room, too, because it also has a recessed light at one end of the room – the other end just stays in shadows.

The hardwoods are finished and they are beautiful! It was very much worth the cost to have them redone before we moved. I’m so glad we decided to go ahead and do it. Now the only problem is that everything else that looked okay before looks a little shabby now. The bathrooms seriously need to be re-tiled and the carpet in the den needs to go away. Oh well, one thing at a time. We’ll work on those things after we move in. Dave wants black and white checkerboard tile in the kitchen and den, so we may be doing that in the near future. He says the colors in those rooms look like an ice cream parlor, so he wants black and white tile. The colors are mint chocolate chip green and brown with white trim. It sounds bizarre, but it turned out really nice and will look wonderful with our furniture and brightly striped curtains. It also brings out the colors in the marble around the fireplace. I’m also thinking that I want to redo the cabinets so that they are all white. Right now, the bottom cabinets are green, which I really liked until we got everything painted. Isn’t that typical? That will also have to wait a while.

Tonight we plan to finish the accent wall and prep the rest of the rooms for painting. We are hoping that since there is no more paneling to paint, we can finish painting the rest of the house this week. Then it will be time to move!

I'll post before and after pictures once we move, so you can see the whole package.

Down in Flames

Literally, that’s how the kitchen light fixture fell out of the ceiling last night. Dave was replacing light bulbs in one of the fixtures that has never worked. It still didn’t work with new bulbs, so he decided to take it apart to see how it was wired. When he got all of the screws out, it started sparking. Obviously, he let go of it and it fell from the ceiling in a shower of sparks! Then it kept smoking and sparking. Honestly, I was looking for a fire extinguisher.

So, we stood there looking up at the hole that it fell out of and I said, “It looks like there is a cord plugged into a light socket.” We decided to call my father (he solves all of our electrical puzzles). I called him: “Daddy, we were taking down one of the kitchen light fixtures and it started shooting sparks all over the kitchen. It looks like there is a plug in there and the cord is melted. What do I need to do so that this house doesn’t burn down tonight?” He said, “I’ll be there in a minute.” :) Meanwhile, I’m thinking, “What have we done?! Our new house is going to burn down.”

He got there and diagnosed the problem immediately: “What you’ve got in the kitchen is complete bullshit.” Thanks, Dad, we were afraid of that. :) However, it was fixable and he helped us straighten it out so as to prevent a fire.

Apparently, someone along the way decided they did not like the original light fixtures, which are recessed in the ceiling with a single 60 watt socket. Instead of just replacing the original fixtures the right way (by taking them down and wiring new ones in the ceiling), that someone used little plugs that screw into light sockets to wire in new fixtures. The new fixture had three 60 watt bulbs, and it was wired to a piece of extension cord, which was plugged into the original 60 watt socket. 180 watts of electricity flowing through a 60 watt socket = FIRE. It sparked when Dave was working on it because the insulation on the extension cord was fried. It fell to the floor because the wiring inside the extension cord had burned to a CRISP.

Daddy got the cord and the screw-in plug out, and we put a single light bulb in the original socket. It worked fine. No smoke or sparks. We found two more lights that were done the same way, so we fixed those as well. I had planned to replace those fixtures; I just didn’t know it would be immediately.

The pictures below are the plug that screws into the light socket, and the burned extension cord. Right after I took this picture, it fell entirely apart.

In other house news, the people will be here next Monday to start refinishing the hardwoods. I picked out the stain color on my way home yesterday. It's going to be Gunstock, which is warm medium brown color. After that, I can paint.

Cinderella Style

Even down to the singing, we scrubbed the floor in true Cinderella style over the weekend. I didn’t see myself in any soap bubbles and my voice isn’t as pretty as hers, but there was a dog (not a cat) tracking over the clean floor. Dave and I spent about 6 hours on our hands and knees scrubbing the dining room floor with brushes and putty knives. We were attempting to remove all of the old carpet pad and glue in order to decide if we would be able to get away with buffing the floors. Once we finished, we could still see the diamond pattern on the wood from the carpet pad. It was discouraging, but we’ve decided to hire someone to sand and refinish all of the hardwood. We can’t justify spending any more time scrubbing when it seems that we aren’t going to be able to get that pattern out, and we concluded that we aren’t ready to learn how to sand hardwoods ourselves. That’s a huge job, and I don’t want to mess it up. On a positive note, the floors will all be the same color and the new finish should last at least for our lifetime in the house. Not to mention, it will be beautiful. Dave is going to get some prices today, and hopefully we can get this done quickly. The mess is going to be horrendous, and the entire house will need to be scrubbed before we can paint.

We spent Sunday working in the backyard. We didn’t want to waste any time, but there really isn’t anything we can do inside until the sanding is complete. My uncle loaded up the old carpet and padding to take it to the dump. We cut the bushes around the back patio, raked the leaves out from under them, and cleaned out the little shed. I discovered that we have baby birds in the shed, so I’m hoping that they grow up and fly away before Dave gets ready to really start working in there. I knew there was a big bird because she has buzzed by us a couple of time, but I didn’t realize there were babies until I heard them squeaking while I was in there yesterday. My cousin is giving us a hot tub (because he’s tired of having it in his house), so we’ve decided to make that shed nice and put the hot tub in there. It should be really fun once it’s finished. I also found out that we have rosemary and strawberries growing in the flower bed on the patio. I think that is so cool, so I’ve decided to plant a few more herbs there and have my very own herb garden. It will be a lot more convenient than trying to find what I’m looking for in the grocery store.

That’s the weekend update.

A couple more pictures..

This is the guest room. I apologize for the blur, it was dark and my camera batteries were low so I was trying to hurry. We are going to keep this color for now because we both like it - it's a slate blue, not quite as baby blue as it looks here. We have already pulled up the carpet. By the way, this is the same carpet that was in the living/dining room. I really like this room because it has three good windows overlooking the backyard.

This is the master bedroom (for now). We will be painting it a cinnamon color to compliment our brown and khaki bedding and curtains. The carpet in this room is gone now, too. There is a very small bathroom with a shower off of this room (below), and of course, the tile is pink. For now, it will stay that way, but eventually I will redo it. The shower pan appears to be in bad shape, but I won't know if it leaks until we use it a few times.

I took this picture of the hallway to show what the hardwoods look like. After pulling up the carpet in the bedrooms and the dining room, we found that the hardwoods under the carpet are slightly darker than this. We also found that they are in pretty good shape, and our friends think we can get away with a good cleaning, buffing them, and putting a new coat of polyurethane on top. If this is what we do, we'll just live with two shades of hardwood, because we'd have to sand them all to get the same color. I don't want to sand if I don't have to because of the time and the mess it will create.

So far, we've removed all the carpet and carpet pad, all the staples that secure the carpet pad, and all of the carpet tack boards. We've started scraping the remaining carpet pad off the floor to prep for cleaning, but that will take some time. The plan for tonight is to do just that. I hope to be scrubbing the floors by this weekend. The power was turned on yesterday, so we are able to work later now and get more accomplished.

As you can see from a couple of the pictures above, The George has been helping with the remodeling. She has had to stay in the backyard for the last two nights because there were too many nails and tacks in the floor for her to be running around, but I'll let her come in tonight. She seems to like the new house and she's sniffed every inch of it, I think.

New House

This picture is our new house, and this is the new remodeling blog. I decided to try and keep life separate from remodeling, although at some point they will become one and the same for me (just not necessarily for the readers).

We closed on the house yesterday, and yesterday was Day 1 of the remodeling. The picture below is our soon-to-be dining / sitting room. I wanted a picture before the carpet was gone, but Dave was too quick for me. What will we do to this room?

The plan is to pull up the carpet (check) and refinish the hardwoods. Then I will paint and hang new curtains that aren't quite so ugly and old-people-smelly. It also needs an overhead light fixture. Basically, the half of the room by the windows will have nice, but comfy, chairs and a table for sitting and reading, chatting, etc. The other half will have the dining room furniture. It's the nicest room in the house, so it's worthy of the antique dining room suite, but I hated to waste all the good light from the windows, so it gets a sitting area too. At least that's the plan right now. It just may be a while before we find the sitting area furniture...

So, that's day one. Day two will consist of pulling the staples out of the hardwood in preparation for refinishing. Not very exciting, I know. We are also refinishing the floors in the upstairs bedrooms, so I'll post pictures of them later.