A little less bold, but more behind.

As you can see, the colors I picked for the office and livingroom, respectively, put a little more neutral into our so-far bold house. I haven't picked up the cans of paint yet because I wanted to get them closer to application time, but I stuck these swatches in my purse (where I immediately forgot up them for a week) to remind myself of the colors I'd already picked. True to form, the scan of the color chips doesn't quite look like the chips themselves - "Stampede" isn't quite so mauve looking and "Flagstone" isn't quite so blueish. With any luck, we'll have both these colors up on the walls by this weekend, dry and ready for the carpet guy on Monday morning.

Unfortunately Aaron has been pretty much solo since Tuesday because I was called in for jury duty (a short two night trial) and tonight and Saturday I'm working at H&R. I hope to put a little "muhuska" (as our not quite 10 fingered shop teacher used to say) behind my brush tomorrow night and get some major progess made in the thus-far-unpainted rooms.

New door and bold colors!

So I took Friday off to "supervise" (read "just be there") the installation of our new sliding glass door. It only took about 3 hours start to finish, and probably only that long because the installer was having a bad measuring day and mis-measured the inner wood and trim a couple of time. Since we are fixing up the wall above and around a bit before we paint, he left the trim off for us.

Here is the old door, complete with metal and wood handle that was about to fall off:

And here is the new door, all pretty and energy efficient:


Then it was on to painting. I was nervous and excited. The woman at the paint desk of Lowes said some people are afraid of color and good for me that I was playing with it. Well, truth be told, I was kind of afraid of the color, but only until I started painting and got into it. And I'm still nervous about the colors yet to be painted! For reference, the rooms will have "slate" grey carpeting, and our master bedroom furniture is cherry.

Here's a nice medium blue for the guest bedroom (still needs a second coat):


And here is my bold choice of "Blue Oasis" for the master bedroom (paint supply money curteous of the family in Mass, hope you guys like it!) It's a touch more "jewel toned" than how it shows up in the pic, but this is as close as the camera came to "true" color:

We're behind schedule?

I don't know if you can be behind schedule when there isn't really a set schedule, but as of last night the carpet installer is coming on Monday, January 29th and we don't have a single wall primed in the rooms he'll be carpeting. We've made good progress with the patches, but aren't quite finished. I say we, but I mean Aaron and his buddy Matt, since my sinus cold turned into a sinus infection and I've been pretty much useless.

On Friday, Matt came up from Long Island to help us get the house prepped a bit more. He's got a bit of experience with drywall, so we were looking forward to his help. Aaron quickly dubbed Matt the "drywall whisperer" as he moved through the house tapping and scraping to find all the weak spots. First thing we found out is that, surprise, we needed to buy more stuff. Since I've got the only temporary Lowes card, I had to drag my sorry butt down with them for the trip. Matt drove down separately since it turns out, ironically, that his little Wrangler was better suited to hauling drywall than our Explorer:


The boys spent a good portion of Friday night and nearly all of Saturday working hard. Aaron bleached the rest of the walls and Matt scraped and patched and worked his magic. I came by with some well deserved grub for the boys, and they enjoyed a little time relaxing. We sure as hell wouldn't eat anything out of that grungy old fridge, but they saw no problem eating off of it:


Aaron and I are also learning a valuable lesson in homeownership - there is always something else that could be or should be fixed. The more time we spend in the house, the more we realize that the hardwood floor in the dining room and hallway should be replaced, the vinyl flooring (eww) is worse than we initially thought and should be replaced as well. For now we are just focusing on the things that must be done before the carpet goes in, but we'll be looking into flooring options for the other rooms in the not too distant future.

Beware the wrath of rugs!

Well, more accurately, the wrath of carpets. On Wednesday night, Aaron and I continued our enthusiastic demolition of the house by removing all the carpets and carpet padding. Silly me didn't think that I might need a dust mask while removing very old, very water damaged material. I woke up the next morning in pure sinus hell. Aaron, being exposed to far worse at work (where they don't wear masks, but probably should!), had nothing more than a tickle in his throat. As I type this, my sinuses are still suffering from my miscalculation, but I managed to feel human enough to drag myself back to work. If any co-workers thought I was skipping out to play with the new house, my current state should show them I most definitely wasn't faking illness! But enough about my misery, here are some mildly-interesting pictures of our progress:

Here is the padlock Aaron had to cut off the garage door. The brainiacs who foreclosed on the house put the lock on to bar unauthorized access, but didn't bother to give anyone the key so the eventual rightful owners could actually open it back up:



Before and After of the livingroom - ugly curtains be gone!

Now just imagine that kind of transformation in every room and you'll have an idea of what we've done. We've also since removed any old hooks or curtain hangers and taken off the outlet covers in preparation for the patching and priming we hope to accomplish this week/weekend.

Aaron also spent nearly all of Sunday constructing a super insulated insert for our attic hatch, which was previously uncovered. Since the recent balmy weather was making a quick retreat, Aaron decided he didn't want to heat the roof anymore.

Also a happy note - turns out the seller's lawyer is better at math than our lawyer, because we did indeed overpay at closing. It's nothing monumental, but we've got a check for $45 and a check for $231 heading our way - cool, paint money!

We have KEYS!!!

Yesterday we had our closing at 3:00pm. By 4:05pm we were homeowners and by 4:20pm we were up at the new house unloading tools and ripping up drywall! At 9pm, the kitchen and hall bath had been giving their initial scrubbing and the laundry room was naked of drywall.

Here is the before of the laundry closet, or "scene of the crime" where the explosion happened:

And here it is a short while after Aaron go ahold of it:


And our freshly scrubbed kitchen, looking pretty nice (and the ugly old curtains pulled down, yay!):