If you're of a mind....

FIRST of all....I don't remember if I mentioned this in another post already. I've been meaning to. But I want to  give a huge shout-out of THANKS A MILLION!! to a super group of friends from our church who came over a month ago and helped us out for a morning at The Projects. They did the work of organizing helpers to come and do some clean-up and it was MAJOR blessing to us! In just a few hours we were all able to do more than John and I alone could have done in at least a whole week, and they made it fun too. We had people scrubbing walls and trim, pulling carpet and staples, basically getting the house all ready for primer and paint. It was just incredible.

People have asked us what's next, and what we're working on currently. So here's the to-do list! And MOST of these things don't require a whole lot of skill... ;o)  We are actually trying to drum up some help August 6th (Saturday), so if you want to come help, yay! We'll feed you, and be sure to invite you to our home for a party after we're moved in, this fall.  =D

This is what we need to accomplish before we can move in:

• Replace switches, outlets, and wall plates upstairs (it's mostly done already)
• Remove vinyl kitchen floor (about half left)
• Finish priming and painting window frames (just the parts that show when the windows are open)
• Finish painting the front screen door
• Prime and paint bathroom cabinet
• Paint bathroom mirror frame
• Install phone jack in front living room
• Wash windows (insides and outsides, up and down) and screens
• Clean stove and oven
• Sweep/vacuum floors in prep for paint
• Tape off baseboards and cut in paint on floors around edges (too much bending over for my belly)
• Prime, paint and seal floors upstairs
• Touch up paint on cabinets and doors
• Hang curtain rods (assuming we're able to buy them soon)

Not crucial before moving in, and lower on the priorities than the above....but in case we get enough help:

• Mowing the lawn (on-going  - we hate having to do it when there's work on the house to do but we try to keep up as much as possible)
• Shoveling rock mulch from the front yard
• Remove basement wallpaper (we have a steamer!)
• Remove basement carpet (at LEAST the carpet in the playroom and part of the hallway)
• Clean out basement fridge and freezer
• Wash playroom walls and trim
• Remove playroom doors
• Prime playroom walls and trim
• Prime storage room

John will be working on laying tile in the bathroom floor and tub surround - in August, as soon as we have the money to purchase tile and supplies. He's never done tile before and is reading up on it - but if you have time and experience (or tools) we'd love the help!

Slow by Jerks

This was a rough week for us as we had some of that once-every-30+ years hot muggy weather. I heard one person say it was hotter here than anywhere else in the world one of the days, once the humidity (82° dew point) and heat index were calculated into the actual temps. Who knows really but it was hot! I just stayed inside. John of course, being an HVAC-R guy, gets busy when the weather turns south. :-P He spent those three hottest days working overtime on hot roofs (and one of all those nifty gadets he uses was measuring 146° at one point up on a hot roof!). So we had little time for the house, and even took a night off (!!!!). So this is what our week looked like:

Sunday - skipped church and slept, we were both feeling sick. Went to HD and bought a bath/shower fixture so John could start on fixing the plumbing.

Monday - skipped softball because John was working quite late (hey, at least he was getting paid to be in the heat!)

Tuesday - John worked late, then we went and just took some measurements at the house. City inspector   requires us to show deck plans so we had to draw our property and house dimensions. I help hold the measuring tape. ;o) I also finished painting the front door! So I'm good for something anyway.

Wednesday - stayed home!

Thursday - John worked on welding the plumbing in the bathroom; I screwed on four bathroom cabinet doors and replaced one light switch. :-P

Friday - I stayed home and John finished the welding. Took the boys and got back at 8pm, much earlier than usual.

These are the bathroom and master bedroom doors which we replaced several weeks ago. Nothing TOO fancy, just hollow-core, but pretty. :) The old ones were just plain and flat, and had some holes. These are the 2 most visible doors of the 4 total upstairs so it was a good switch - and we got a great deal! Now to find glass door knobs somewhere.

Now, the kitchen cabinet hardware up there? Not staying. Nuh-uh. It's the old stuff but we don't have the moola to get new stuff yet. Kind of painful to go through all the work of putting the doors back up knowing we have to take it all down and replace it eventually, but we don't know how soon it will be before that happens. So we did.

And for as many skillz as we have, painting and hanging cabinets isn't one of them. There are drips, the sheen is wrong (thank you pregnancy brain), and many of the doors stick or rub. Ah well. I had some inner  conniptions over the whole thing and now I'm over it (and, gulp, some not so inner - sorry Hubs). There are more important things in life than perfect kitchen cabinets. Some day I'll go over them with a coat of semi-gloss, and they'll have new hardware. And SOME day, way down the road - we'll just replace them with new cabinets and PAY someone ELSE to install them. Until then, they're at least worlds better than before!

And here's my pretty pretty door! We - the John and Elizabeth Family - we are Blue Door people. So if we plan to call a place Home, it gets a Blue Door.

I'm envisioning a cute chair (maybe with a brightly colored pillow), a very large blue planter, and some kind of rug on this porch. And maybe something vertical to go with the tall ceiling? Ideas welcomed! 

And yes, the screen door handle is not yet put back. I swore when I removed it that I would remember how to put it back in. But then, I didn't. So oops.

Pictures!

This is called knock-down, and it's how our ceilings look now. Good-bye tobacco stained popcorn! John and his brother Paul scraped it all off - this was at least a month ago now - and then sprayed all the upstairs ceilings and "knocked" it down. It was a HUGE help to have Paul there! It's a big, messy job. They've both had years and years of experience doing ceilings and it looks SO so much better. 

Here's what it looked like after we (John actually, all by his lonesome) painted July 4th weekend. Our friend Troy, a painter by trade, loaned us a sprayer and gave all kinds of tips. He does houses with smoke damage a lot and recommended a shellac-based primer to seal out (in?) the smell. He said Kilz sometimes just doesn't cut it and while the Zinzer BIN shellac primer is 2x as expensive - we weren't taking any chances!

As you can see, he painted pretty much everything but the floors! Which will get their turn later next month. As I said in my last post, the difference is amazing. Happy sigh. =D

Here's what we worked on last weekend....

Putting cabinet doors back on

(Usually what the boys do is....Connor plays with neighbor kids outside until he or they have to come in. Joseph is Daddy's shadow but sometimes plays outside too. When they come in, they "work", or play with whatever toys they brought. Sometimes they color or watch a movie on the laptop or iPod).

Now for - THE DOOR! Drum roll please...

It took me one evening just to tape everything off for the screen door. And as you can see (but hopefully didn't notice right away) I didn't think to cover the porch floor at all... I'm SO happy with the color of spray paint I picked. I guess we'll have to deal with the floor later.

On Friday night (a week ago) John and I had our first real date in months. We ate at home alone and then went to Lowe's to price out tile. Here's what we'll be putting on the bathroom floors! After Lowe's we sipped cold drinks at the Barnes & Noble cafe while browsing books on home decor and renovation. =D

On Saturday (Day 2 of a looong stretch of hot and muggy to the max here in MN) I finished painting the front door...but ran out of blue paint with 3 of those squares to go. And by then I was ready to call it a day.

John and his youngest brother Philip got a lot done though. They got the bathroom completely torn apart, removed the vinyl floor, and put up tile backer around the tub! Thanks for the help Philip!

Currently: Whiteness

Want to know how WE spent Independence Day weekend? The boys and I did all the things we normally do when John is gone, and John - well. He transformed the upstairs at The Projects into massive, wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-ceiling fresh clean white. ME SO HAPPY!!!! Pretty much everything you look at now is white, excepting only the fireplace, and the places the over-spray missed on the floors. But everything else, trim and cabinets included, has been primed with shellac-based primer, and assuming this most expensive stuff does what it's lauded to do, the stink shall be NO MORE. ALL you smell when you walk in is wonderful, fresh PAINT!!!

I haven't taken any pictures yet of the aftermath so for this post you get to see everything ELSE we accomplished leading up to this point.

First of all, remember the kitchen? We didn't think those tiny upper cabinets over the pass-through were really worth the closed-off feeling it gave the kitchen.

 Don't you just love the dropped ceiling with fluorescent lights??

 So yeah, we took the whole thing OUT.

We (that would be John actually) added a support frame so we can hang a pot rack over the peninsula.

MUCH better!

Also...notice that upper end cabinet? I want that one and the one on the other side of the window to be open front.

So Johnboy fixed it for me. =D

He also added a door way between the Front Room and the hallway. It used to look like this:

He cut a nice hole and framed it up good (it's a load-bearing wall). Here's from the hallway:

And here's looking looking at the hallway and beyond, to the kitchen. It makes it so much more open, it's hard to imagine why the builders didn't do this in the first place!

He also changed the existing archway to match the new one, giving it a nice up-to-date look.

Before:

After:

And with his amazing drywall skillz, finished off both quite beautifully. What handy kind of guy!

Meanwhile, I was still removing wall paper. I also helped the boys turn this area behind the backyard shed, into their own little garden. This is the Before picture.

This lilac bush/tree is pretty overgrown, so I cut it back by a third. BTW, a sawzall is totally the way to go for such a task. Now the boys' garden gets more sun. I'll cut it back by another third for the next two years, so it can be revived. And yes, the tire is going ASAP. Ew.

Rhubarb!!!!