Boring work and an ugly cabinet

Last night we spent a good chunk of time at the house, but the work was so boring, Aaron said he'd rather be installation insulation - oh my! The doors to the interior rooms were grungy and some had mold, so we were scrubbing them clean then applying the "Killz" type primer to prep them for a coat of white paint. Our goal is to get all of them up and put together w/their new hardware so that we can protect our nice new paint/carpet in the other rooms while we are working on the hall/dining/kitchen and hall bath. They should be ready for the white paint tonight and then we may start on the closet doors too, just to get it all done with.

Also, Aaron pulled down the medicine cabinet that I had unscrewed but was still wired in. It's ugliness is no longer installed on our master bathroom wall, hurray! Just imagine it even nastier looking with a yellow plastic case over those light bulbs - gag!



I'm not sure what we'll put up to replace it, given our limited funds, but anything is better than that!!

Purchase, not progress...

Yesterday Aaron and I stopped down to the Home Depot because he'd heard there was a sale on flooring. We'd already looked around online and it looked like flooring for the hall/dining/kitchen area was going to be about $700-800, not including extra supplies like underlayment or spacers. The "clearance" was really two small piles in the middle of the flooring isle with marked down prices, but luckily one of those items was a pretty "Sarasota Oak" by Trafficmaster that looks like it'll match well w/our patio door. It was only 98 cents a square foot and they had just a little over the amount we need (with lots of room for mistakes) left in stock. Since we didn't want someone else to snatch it up, we loaded up my little Mirage with the 14 boxes. Including supplies for laying it down and the underlayment foam, it was just over $480. With any luck, we'll even have a box or two to return. My Mirage is definitely not made for hauling heavy loads... just driving Aaron back to the apt (he had to work overtime) and over to the house to unload burned 1/4 tank of gas!

It's now all waiting patiently on some cardboard in our garage until we've pulled up the current flooring and gotten it all prepped. Aaron has hopes for this week, but I'm thinking more like this weekend if the vinyl-removal doesn't cause too many problems. First task on the list is finishing the insulation - I have the crazy idea that maybe we'll go all out and finish that tonight, even though we have about half the crawlspace left! We've got the supplies, so it's a matter of time and fiberglass tolerance, wish us luck!

Unexciting progress

Unfortunately there are no cool Extreme Makeover: Home Edition type photos to go along with this progress. I did rip down wallpaper in teeny master bath, but I had originally gone to the house to touch up paint, so I didn't think a camera was needed. It wasn't horrible wallpaper, but I didn't get the under layer so now I just have alot of brown paper colored walls until I soak it all and peel it off. That's what I get for being impatient when I couldn't find the nifty little wallpaper puncturing tool.

The majority of the progress has been made under the house, as Aaron continued his foray into insulation replacement. It's nasty dirty work and I haven't helped yet (but I will!) so it hasn't gone all that fast and he's been less than enthused about continuing but plugs on because the prospect of high electricity bills is a greater motivator than the nastiness of the job is a deterrant. He's about halfway done and he's going to buy more insulation today so that we can go over and get some more covered.. I have my fingers crossed that we'll finish it, but given all the space we have left to cover, I'm not counting on it.

In unrelated and too exciting news - within several days of being with us, our new boxer boy Dash was diagnosed with sterile meningitis. It's an auto-immune problem with no real known cause and it goes away with a long dose of steriods. This is one reason there hasn't been alot of progress on the house, but now that he's settling in with the meds, we should be able to put more time into making some headway.

I still have hopes that we'll move in before the drop-dead deadline of our lease (at the end of April) and be living in our new house by the end of March.

A lesson learned

Leaving paint trays filled with water in the bathtub because you want to avoid cleaning them is not a wise move. Unless the paint colors you plan on using afterwards will look nice with a "rusty patina" effect to them, the rusting will render the paint trays useless, along with having another undesirable effect:


The paint I'm not worried about, it's latex and it'll scrub off, but the rust is going to be tricky. And to think, this was our "good" tub that didn't have rust stains!

In further progress, Aaron got about 1/5 of the insulation in the crawl space put up over the weekend, and also enlarged the hole (I started but got discouraged) for the dryer vent so he can hook that up down in the crawl space as well. I ended spending a good deal of my time there on Sunday scrubbing out the rollers we had bagged to avoid washing, and doing some beginning damage control (yes, that picture is an after) on the tub.

More progress and some excitement

Matt was back up this weekend and although I didn't get to see any of the work in action since I was stuck at H&R Block, the progress they made was easy to see. All of our faucets finally work, Aaron finished up installing both the ones in the hall bath:

He also did the kitchen, but I forgot to get a pic!

They also put up the new light fixtures that we bought, replacing one broken cut-glass ugly thing in the kitchen and this nasty thing (dissassembled but still clearly hideous) from the dining room:

The new fixtures for both rooms now look like this:

and one small fixture of the same design is waiting to be put up in the connected hallway. Aaron and I stopped by together on Sunday to do some minor touch up work on the paint in the carpetted rooms and to get our new smoke/radon detector officially attached. We probably could have been doing more on Sunday, but we wanted to relax and we had something distracting us:

This is Dash, our new addition to the family. He's a 7 mo old boxer who was just too much for his last owners to handle. With the help of Xena, we are getting him settled into the family and teaching him how to be the good little boy that he truly is!

Next on the list for repairs is replacing all the insulation in the crawl space because, unlike what the inspectors said, it's all completely shot. Given the nice little $232 bill we just got from NYSEG, we definitely want to rectify that problem! Also, cleaning, replacing the hardware, and putting the doors to the bedrooms/office back up so we can be sure the construction dust from our kitchen/dining room projects don't muck up our brand new carpets.

Picture almost-perfect

After our 2nd closing yesterday (another fiasco of minor proportions that definitely has us wanting to avoid lawyers and bankers) I convinced Aaron to run up to the house with me and pick up the camera so I could retrieve the much clamored for pictures of our new carpets and, of course, Xena enjoying them. So, at long last, here is some visual gratification for my viewers:

Aaron and his little bro, Chris, pulling old carpet staples from the plywood in preparation for the carpet:


The Master Bedroom:


The Guest Bedroom:


The Office:


And our adorable little Xena-bean ...

Checking out how well she compliments the new carpet:


Chasing her nub in celebration:


Giving me attitude for walking beyond the carpet gate Aaron put up, and out of her reach:

Curses, foiled again!

Earlier this month, Aaron found an ad on Craig's List for two slightly used 8' hydronic baseboards (full price for these is normally around $500 for both). Hydronic baseboards (for electric heat) are supposed to be more energy efficient because they have a liquid (water or oil, I'm not sure) sealed inside them. When the heat kicks on, the liquid gets warmed up and it stays warm after the heat turns off, resulting in needing to turn the heat on less often. Our two largest rooms already had the traditional 8' baseboard installed and we thought it'd be a great idea to switch them out for newer, more efficient units. Well, last night when Aaron attempted to install the first one in the livingroom, unhooking the old unit and all, when he discovered that the wires in our "new" baseboards were coming out of the opposite end as our old baseboards. Essentially, when you line it up properly against the wall, the connection is nearly 8' from where we need it. He is hoping to brainstorm with Matt over the weekend to make it work, and I'm certainly hoping we didn't waste our money!

In other news, today at 4pm we have our "2nd closing" - since the work we hired out to be done on the house has been completed, we have to go back to the office to sign papers locking us in to the much lower "normal" rate of our loan, instead of the prime +2 we had to pay during the "construction" phase. After this, I think we'll be avoiding lawyer's and mortgage offices for a while!

Also, my profound apologies for the recent lack of photos. I took photos of the paint in the 4 carpeted rooms, photos of the rooms post-carpeting and even got a couple shots of our boxer, Xena, enjoying her first visit to the interior of the house and initiating the carpet with some vigorous play-bowing and nub-chasing. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring the camera home Monday night, and Aaron has forgotten to bring it from his visits since then. Don't despair, photos will be posted as soon as our memories improve!