Progress in progress…

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

What a weekend. Our apartment is nearly empty and half-clean. I’m worn out and still have to do some planning for school this week tonight. I cannot wait for the day when I can wake up and not have to worry about painting or anything related to the house renovations.

Some milestones. The contractor replaced the damaged trim and installed a new facade over the garage door. He also put in some baseboards. Perhaps the most exciting accomplishment – the countertop was installed this week. The formica color is mineral sepia, and it turned out much better than we anticipated. It goes real well with our color scheme and has that stone feel to it. We also bought a lawn mower for our yard. No new house is complete without something to manage the yard!

We rented a truck to move our furniture and only logged 25 miles on the truck so that was a good deal compared to the cost of moving from Chicago to Denver. At least that was tax-deductible. With the help of Conor, we moved all the heavy stuff into the truck and then M-B and I moved everything into the house ourselves (with the help of these forearm straps you might have seen on tv. They do help!). Unfortunately somebody couldn’t hold up her end of the couch (literally…) so I had to call on Conor again to help move that red couch. That was Saturday.

Today we returned the truck and focused on painting. I primed all the shelves that’d go into the upper cabinets. I had a nice system going where I’d let several shelves dry while I primed the others. By 1:30 the weekend’s work was getting to me so we took a lunch break and I just had to take a nap. M-B managed to finish the kitchen walls. All we have to do is do the edges and the doors for the cabinets.

What sucks now is we have the bedrooms and the living room to finish painting before we really can get settled in. Probably another two or three weekends and then we can call it a paint job.

As we were heading out, we realized we had to remove the bricks from the patio area so the contractor can relay the ground so it’s more level. 214 bricks later we had a pile of bricks about thigh high and bare ground. Imagine moving 20+ pounds of bricks more than 20 feet over 100 times. A good way to lose weight…

Now it’s time to finish cleaning up the apartment. Can somebody else do it for us?

– AVR

August 20-21

Weekend consisted of PRIMING, PRIMING, and MORE PRIMING…..

One gallon of Cincinnatian Hotel Hannaford later and this is what the TV room and kitchen look like now. Nice earth tones. Next is to paint the cabinets and doors.

{Edit: The pre/post ceiling pics you see is the 1st floor bathroom. Only room on this floor that has no popcorn texture and it only took 10 mins max to paint it.}

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Week of August 14 – House Progress

Dumpster at house for all the siding that’ll be replaced. The exterior colors you see right now will no longer exist once they repaint.

Ceiling being worked on. This was before the sprayer came in handy.

Cabinets being primed – All Aaron’s hard work last night and the night before. (We all need his energy!)

Quick Update

It’s 5:45 p.m. and Aaron came home for a quick dinner then left to go to the house to prime the cabinet doors. You guessed it.. I have homework to do.

We heard from our contractor today and they’ve already ordered the kitchen countertops. Windows will be ordered tomorrow. They say that all the work we hired them to do should be done around the 1st week of September?! Talk about putting pressure on us to get things done.

Saturday: Between Aaron and I, he did the stripping of the cabinet doors and I did the sanding. All for 5 hours.

Sunday: Started out using a foam roller and oil based primer to work on the ceilings. It worked much better! Thanks to Jackie’s husbands suggestion! But most of our ceiling in the living/kitchen area is angled, so Aaron and his friend rented a sprayer and they primed AND painted all the 1st floor ceilings.

I’ll have Aaron update this post tomorrow night with pictures from our camera as I don’t have the camera to laptop cord. I know I won’t be able to blog for the rest of the week, so I’m hoping setting this one up will make it easier for Aaron to hit “edit” and add the better photos tomorrow night. 🙂 Here are some from my blackberry:

1. 2nd bedroom being primed
2. Hallway ceiling half primed (yellow is the smoke damage)
3. Aaron and the sander at work (notice his haircut?)
4. Beautiful flowers. I need to trim all those dead stems.

Have a great week! XO

Tip of the week: To answer this frequent question “how do I know there’s a new post?” — look to the right side of the blog page, and you will see an “Email Subscription” widget. Click on the “Sign Me Up!” button and you will now be notified when we have posted a new blog.

Taste Buds vs. Waistline

It’s so much fun being married to someone who has a passion for cooking and excels at it. While I get a lot of “lucky you” comments, his cooking is a challenge for me at times. My taste buds say “oh, so delicious I’m going back for seconds or even thirds” while my waistline says “M-B, not a very wise decision to go back for seconds”. What a mental battle that is especially now that I’ve lost some weight in the last couple months and trying to keep it off is way challenging.

Aaron’s newest experiment has been using peanut oil instead of vegetable oil to fry food. We bought corn tortillas a while back and we haven’t eaten them fast enough, so he got creative and fried the tortillas and OH MY GOSH. I had to snap a picture of them before I ate all of the tortilla chips with a dash of sea salt! If you like this kind of food, be sure to put in a request to the chef to serve these fresh if you come visit. 😀

This is one of the perks of being married to a southern boy. The in-laws send hushpuppy mix (thank you so much!!) and I’ve even mastered the skill in cooking hushpuppies which I’m not sure is a good thing. 🙂

Yummm…… off to finish off nibble on one chip. I do have to share after all.

Happy Thursday!

XO
~ The well fed wife

House Renovation Part 1

What a week!

First step we took when we finally got the keys to the house is we changed locks. Then I went around and started placing drop cloths on the carpet. We hope to see the carpet replaced with wooden flooring sometime in the next year. I also removed all the outlet covers. Aaron gutted the countertops and removed the sink as that was part of our demolition responsibilities (agreeing to do this kind of work yourself saves you somewhere around $450). This small detail really is irrelevant, but I want to be able to look back a few years from now and reminisce over every little detail! Bare with me, please.

As I type away, Aaron’s at the house doing some more stripping/sanding of the cabinet doors. We’re getting new countertops installed, so we needed to get everything we want done in the kitchen done now (floor, countertops, cabinets, painting the wall) otherwise nothing would look balanced. It’s very common to say we’ll do “one thing” later but it all turns into procrastination. Now’s the time. We’ll find the time to do it even if it means an extra cup of coffee per day for us!

I’ve been focused on priming the inside walls and the ceiling. Every time I hear or see the word “popcorn”, I cringe. Popcorn is delicious, especially movie theater style. However, POPCORN TEXTURED ceilings. Oh my heavens. If you are ever asked if you will gladly prime a ceiling like ours, I suggest you kindly say “no, thank you.” You’ll thank me. 🙂

If any one of you has primed a popcorn textured ceiling and have had absolutely no problems doing it, please send your secrets my way. Ours has smoke damage to them, so one of our requirements as a Good Neighbor Next Door is to get rid of it. Well, yeah, I don’t think I’d want people walking into our house and seeing smoke damaged ceilings. 🙂 Instead, you can give me praise when they look all nice and bright white. Kidding. I’m ready for them to be done with so I can focus on the more fun stuff such as interior decorating.

Ok, enough with the text. Photos right here! I wanted to do two slideshows, one before and one during… but I can’t figure it out. Maybe when Aaron gets home, he can fix it.

BEFORE PHOTOS

Kitchen

     

TV Room. The walls were a gray or light blue color, we’re aiming for a two-toned color 1st floor so they didn’t fit into our plan. We’re going for a lighter color than what they were, so we had to prime walls.

DURING RENOVATION PHOTOS
Removing hinges from doors.                    Demo work
               

Sanding down wood.

               

Cabinet doors (sanded down on the left, original on the right). Our goal is to get them a shell white color. It will open up the kitchen. The original color was making the kitchen look so tiny!

Spackling.                                                     Priming tv room.

            

Ready to tackle the ceiling,

              

Off to do my student responsibilities aka math homework. Toodles for now!

xo

Stay Tuned…

Happy Wednesday! When working in the corporate world, I used to always say ‘Happy Hump Day’ as I’d be excited I was nearly halfway through the work week. I wonder if I’ll start using that phrase again when I start working again.

I’m 1 1/2 weeks through my first class which is “Teaching Elementary Math”. It’s been quite interesting! Math has always been my least favorite subject as it was hard for me to learn it back in the elementary days so I was quite terrified going into this class hoping it wouldn’t be a nightmare for me. It turns out to be the opposite. I am learning so much about how kids learn different ways to do math problems. Last night as I was studying for a quiz I have today, I muttered to myself  ‘I wish my teachers showed me word problems through bar diagrams back in the day’. I guarantee you, I would have had my “aha, I get it” moment because I learn very well through visuals. Hence, us learning many different ways to solve one arithmetic problem so we can add that wide range of knowledge to our tool boxes and be prepared to teach in different ways.

Home ownership. Yes, most of you know by now that we own a house. Let’s just say, we are both relieved the process is over with. We’re now the Good Neighbors Next Door (GNND). We closed on Friday, and we’ve already done the demo work that we’re responsible for. I’ve already started priming the interior walls. Aaron’s already started sanding down the cabinets. Our contractors should be starting the other renovation work any day now. We’re trying to be good about taking pre/post photos so we can share with those who wish they could be with us throughout making this house more our style. We love that everyone’s asking for pictures, it keeps us motivated!

If any of you have extra sleep you’d like to give away, we’ll both gladly take it! In between Aaron back to work, me taking classes and doing tons of homework, and potentially having a part time job within the next week or so there’s not much free time left for us to do the renovating. We do it when we could be sleeping! 🙂

So, stay tuned……..

xo