Where to start

By the time we closed on our house, we'd already spent over a month listing projects, and pricing everything as detailed as we could. We wanted to know how to budget, prioritize, etc. Then, we closed on a Friday, but had commitments all weekend and couldn't start until the middle of the following week. We were so anxious to get in there and get busy! There is SO much to do.

It was certainly hard to know exactly where to start. So many projects, minor and major, and with a move-in goal of Sept. 1st, time seems short. At the top of John's list was the water problem in the basement. It was possibly due to a gutter that needed re-routing, and some cracks in the driveway in all the wrong spots. So that's where he got to work first.

On top of MY list was all the wallpaper. It had likely been there since the house was first built, and had to be taken down before we could do anything with the walls and ceilings. Thankfully it wasn't everywhere, but there was enough of it to last me a while.

1-1/2 walls in the family room

The kitchen

The entryway

The bathroom - groovy eh? This stuff come off the easiest, in big sheets requiring no scoring or steaming. Nice.

The rec room in the basement

....and what we'll call the guest room (1 of 2 bedrooms in the basement).

Before we had even decided for sure to move ahead with the house, while we were still pricing various projects, I happened to find a very nice wallpaper steamer on Craig's List, for about the cost of renting one for a day. So that saved us a lot of time and money - Yay! It took me about 2 weeks to finish removing all the upstairs wallpaper. The basement has a little over half left to be removed as well. But we're not focusing so much on the basement right now anyway. Our main goal is to get the upstairs move-in ready, and then work on the basement after we're settled in. The upstairs alone is probably twice as big as our current abode, so no complaints here!

So yeah, removing wallpaper was pretty much my only project at The Projects for a while - that and doing a bit of yard work, which I'll get to in another post. John on the other hand worked on one thing after another, all kinds of putzy but very necessary little odd jobs all over the house. Too many to list and probably too boring to read about. The biggest things he did though, which made a HUGE difference in the whole feel of the upstairs, were: adding a wide doorway from the Front room (aka living room) to the hallway; and taking out the upper cabinets and pass-through wall you see in the kitchen picture above. And, of course, re-framing both and drywalling over. At which he is a major pro. Pictures soon to follow!