No bathroom fan...




Fabulous bathroom fan!

Very nice work, Jake. You're more capable that you let on! He also hooked up a new digital thermostat and I finished painting the living room, kitchen, hallway, and computer desk area.

We had a plumber out to give us an estimate for the intense (aka beyond our capabilities) work in the bathroom remodel. He informed us that our pink tub (the one that terrifies our children) weighs about 300 lbs. He recommended taking a sludgehammer to it and removing it in pieces. Yikes.

For the rest of this week, I'll be starting on the artwork painting in one of the girl's bedrooms while Jake rips into (or rather, rips up) the carpet in the rest of the house. We've decided that we'd rather have clean floorboards than the stenchy carpet until we can purchase new flooring. Hopefully sooner than later....

We went from three of these:


To three of these:

New lighting and fans in the bedrooms. Wohoo! Good job, honey!

(Creepy music playing): the SHAG room

Don't even know where to begin with this room...as you can see, wall to wall (and UP wall) shag. The original, thick, multi-colored, worm-like stuff. It smelt awful of moth balls. We think they simply closed off the room (it's off the garage) and used it for storage.

We ripped out the shag and kilzed the subfloor (concrete but we kilzed it anyway) and the ceiling. I've scrubbed down the lovely faux stone paneling and the just-as-lovely faux wood paneling, so they are at least bearable until Jake can rip it all off and put up new drywall.

And here is the beast again; Jake's wrestling mat, which we almost had sold before we moved and then decided to keep intending to use it for this room. It serves it's purpose; a (mostly) clean and soft place for the girls to play. For now, this space will be used as a toy room. The girls love it; while it's not in the basement, it is a level below the family room. Some day Jake and I would like to transfigure the space into a master suite. We have more pressing projects to attend to first, so for now it's on the backburner.

One of the first things we needed- a place to hang coats and sweatshirts for 4 children and 2 adults. Jake will be adding a bench the length of this closet to sit on and store shoes under and a shelf above to stash hats and gloves and such.

We certainly spent our labor day weekend laboring!

This house has wall to wall olderish carpet that has a strong dog/cat odor so we have intentions of replacing all of the flooring within the next few weeks. On a whim, Jake pulled up a corner in one of the bedrooms, and lo and behold: originial hardwood flooring! He checked the 2nd bedroom; 2 for 2! He checked the master bedroom: just disappointment. You'd think they would have put it in that room for sure, but nonetheless, we have 2 less rooms to put new flooring in (the living area also came back negative and I'll be posting soon about the situation in the family room). So Jake tore up the carpet in those two rooms and we spent a few hours pulling up nail strips and staples.


The floor in this room is in really nice shape and will not need to be refinished any time soon. We will need to add quarter round to the baseboards.



The floor in the smaller room is in a little rougher shape. It's so much better than the carpet that was there, but we'll do a sand and refinish on it maybe next spring.

And speaking of new flooring in the rest of the house (other than the master bedroom which we'll try to match with these other two bedrooms), we're thinking of bamboo with a cherry finish. Any thoughts? I have an aunt who doesn't like the dark uniformity of her floor; so maybe consider throwing in a few ligther pieces here and there for variety?

My parents came for the weekend so our work didn't stop with flooring. Jake organized the garage and both cars fit now. I painted ceilings in the kitchen, upstairs bath, hallway, and one bedroom. Jake had seen a segment on HGTV about using newspaper to take down wallpaper. We gave it a whirl and it worked like a charm in one room, but not so much so in this one. This room (the master) had more of a textured wallpaper so it didn't work quite as well. You basically spray the wallpaper with water (we did not score either room but it probably wouldn't have hurt), slap on a piece of dry newspaper, spray that wet until it's saturated and sticks to the wall. Continue on in segments and keep the newspaper wet as you go (good idea to have your floor protected with plastic or some such). I think we waited about 30 mins and then started peeling off where we started and it came off in nice strips. In the room where the paper and backing came off smoothly, we (my saintly mother) had to scrub off the glue residue. In the room where the paper came off but we (my most amazing husband) had to scrape off the backing, there was no glue to scrub off. So between the two experiments we came close to what could be a fairly easy job.

The roof was replaced 4 years ago and the septic system last fall. The windows are all older double hung; they worked great after we opened them up from being painted shut. The previous owners said they never had the windows open but always had the ac or heat running.

Speaking of the heat or ac running, we had the duct work professionally cleaned yesterday. What a mess! About 2" of grime around all of the ducts. Well worth the money spent to know we'll be breathing clean air. There are options to spray in a sanitizing chemical, but we chose not to do that. My parents came to help clean the wkd we moved in, and my mother's cleaning of all of the registers brought their disgusting state to our attention. If you live in a home where this has never been done, even if it's a new home, we highly recommend it.

We are going to start saving for a new heating system. We're thinking of going with an outside wood burning stove. Any thoughts or experiences with this? Also will be putting in a new, higher efficiency ac unit within the next year. Any suggestions?

Another item to check off our list is the installation of a water softener today. Since we moved in, we haven't been able to get our shampoo to lather and our dishes come out of the dishwasher with a cloudy, spotty appearance. In addition, our clothes still have a lingering unclean odor after coming out of our nearly new high efficiency wash machine. We had a water softener installed in our previous house and it made a world of difference. Hoping for the same here.

This weekend's projects include painting some ceilings (a great spot for odor to cling) and adding some shelves to the toy room closet.

Exterior

What we love most about this spot is the nearly 7 acres, about 4 of which are wooded. We came looking with the mindset that we can make any house a home, but we couldn't do anything about the land with the house. So rather than pay the same amount for a new house in town, we opted for a project on a nice piece of land.



The back of the house; boxes, boxes everywhere.

Nice little feature.

The front of the house. This style is a quad level with the basement (the bottom level) being unfinished. The previous owners took really good care of the place, but didn't do alot in the way of updating. This house is a one owner gem and those owners liked it the way it was. :)