Things Are Finally Coming Together

Alright, so Sunday and Monday of the Memorial weekend were not as heavy on the "remodeling" per se, but there were a few things to mention that we accomplished.

I went to Lowes to pick up a few things we didn't think about on Friday when we were there and I had to get some hardware for the grill. I also got to buy some vise grips because I found a pair that was on sale for $5 off and I needed them to help me remove a bolt on the grill that was stripped. Fortunately, once I got that new hardware and the stripped bolt removed, there was only a few more steps to follow before the grill was finished. So, I got that done. Then, I prepared the grill for cooking because we were expecting her parents over that evening for dinner.

Around 4 that day, Cass's parents stopped by on their way home from Dayton, OH because Cooper had a soccer tournament down there over the weekend. Cass's Dad, Kevin, helped me out with installing some conduit for the 220 volt power line in the laundry room for the dryer. The previous owners just had the wire dangling from the wall. So we got that done. Then, we replaced the duct work for the dryer through the garage with some new hard duct work instead of the old flexible, convoluted duct work. All the while Kevin and I were doing this, I was also grilling up some chicken for dinner. I was totally multitasking!

With the conduit installed and the duct work in place, we started moving the appliances in. Since the laundry room was kind of small we had a fun time reaching around the back of the dryer to connect the vent ducts. Once we got all that hooked up, the finished product made us happy! Cass and I did our first load of laundry that night and stared at them for a little while like a couple of 3 year olds watching tv going, "Cooooool."

Later on, the five of us had a grilled chicken dinner sitting in our lawn chairs with no table. It was great!

On Monday we really didn't do any remodeling. We pretty much just moved over some stuff from the apartment like the mattress and bedroom furniture. We had my parents over for another BBQ. This one was a lot less chaotic since we weren't installing any appliances and cooking at the same time!

My Mom and Dad bought us a nice set of patio furniture that we got to use for dinner which was nice because eating at a table when you're outside is a lot easier. Cass and I were really happy about that, too, because we had been looking at patio furniture but we always refrained from buying anything because we had more important stuff we needed to use our budget for before moving in. So that was very nice of them.

The last thing I did on Monday after Cass and I moved over one more trip's worth of stuff was I hung our bikes from the rafters in the garage. We're so happy we finally have a place for all of our transportation-type vehicles.

OK! Time for what everybody's been waiting for...Before and After pictures! Right now we've only finished the master bedroom and kitchen, but we've got some good pictures of both rooms to share.


The Kitchen Before...


After!


Opposite wall of the kitchen before...


After!


Master bedroom before...


After! This one's probably my favorite transformation! The ceiling fan looks 20 times better than the old one.


Bedroom/Bath vanity before...


After!

We're soooooo happy with the results. Once we get all our stuff moved in, I'll post some pictures of everything.

Stay tuned, we've got a living room to paint this weekend, so there's still more to come!

Day...uhh...Aahh Who's Counting?

Wow, what a great weekend!! Let me start with Friday and Saturday! Next post, I'll put in Sunday and Monday..

Ok, so Friday Cass and I had dinner at the apartment with the intention of heading right over to the house after getting dinner because we were dog sitting her parent's Jack Russell "Callie" and we were going to finish painting the bedroom. We met up at the apartment and decided we'd shorten our lives by getting some McDonald's for dinner and THEN go to the house. Instead, we ended up going to Lowes because we saw in an ad that they had this Whirlpool High Efficiency Front-loading washer and dryer combo on sale for less than a grand. We were like, Whoa! We need a washer and dryer and you can't beat that price for the combo! So we went on a small shopping spree, getting all the little things we needed for the new appliances, some light fixtures, and a ceiling fan for the bedroom. We finally got back to the house at 8 that night...aaaaannnd we still had a bedroom to paint.

We got right to painting the bedroom. We were up until 2am getting those two coats up on the walls. Poor Callie was walking around looking at us most of the night like "Why aren't you people sleeping?" We thought that was kinda funny, but I went down and got her crate/bed and brought it upstairs so she could have somewhere comfortable to lay down. The finished product looks great. We're really happy with the color choices we went with. The green is just tiny bit darker than our apartment bedroom's green wall and the tan color is considerably lighter than at the apartment, but it looks way better in our opinion.

So...Saturday, understandably, we slept in a bit. Luckily, that didn't turn out to be such a bad thing, but the night before we figured it'd be a good idea to get right back to the house to let Callie out, so we were all rushed, disoriented, and tired. On top of that, we had promised to lend ourselves and truck to some friends (Aaron and Megan) from our bible-study group who were moving and we were supposed to be there around 10ish. PLUS, the Lowe's delivery people called us right after we woke up to inform us that they'd be at the house with our washer and dryer between 10am and 2 pm. We asked the cashier who was checking us out when we bought the appliances to schedule the delivery for the afternoon. What a huge help that 4 hour window was for our schedule that day! NOT! We woke up at like 9:30, so all that just made for a chaotic morning.

We decided that I'd just go help Aaron and Megan move and Cass would go to the house to let out Callie and wait for the Lowe's delivery people to show up. I got back to the house around 2:30ish and Cass and I started putting the Kitchen back together. The only thing left to do in the kitchen was put the chair moulding back up, move the appliances back in place, and put light-switch and outlet covers back on. So we did all that. We also finished installing the light fixtures in the kitchen.

After that, I decided to tackle the ceiling fan in the bedroom. The old one was...well...lets just say totally not our style. I installed it without any real problems during the installation....or so I thought. Once it was up on the ceiling, I got down and flipped the breaker switch back on and came back upstairs to test it out. I flipped the switch for the light, and it worked. Then, with the light off, I flipped the switch to the fan, and it worked! The only peculiar thing we noticed was when you turned on the fan, the light had an ever-so-slight glow to it. That glow got dimmer as you turned down the fan speed, too. Initially we thought nothing of it, but later we realized that if the fan was on when you turned the light on, the fan would turn off. If you turned the light off, the fan would turn back on. That's when we knew something was up. Fortunately, with this particular type of fan, you can just take off the collar that goes around the mount to access the wiring instead of having to take the entire fan back down to work on the wiring. I swapped the two white "common" wires and actually attached the ground wires to the junction box and put it all back together. I fixed it! When we were initially putting the fan up, the instructions said if the house's wire colors don't match the colors on the unit, don't continue with that installation and get a professional to install the fan. I was like "Screw that! What could go wrong?" HA HA! Good one. The other thing we did in the bedroom was replace the light fixture over the bathroom vanity. Looks nice don't it?

The other thing we tackled was I started building the new charcoal grill we bought. The directions had a typo in them so Cass and I ended up using the wrong bolts to put the thing together and since they have your use a certain type of lock nuts, the bolt gets stripped out when you try to remove them. So We had to go to Lowes on Sunday to get some new hardware. So that project wasn't finished until Sunday.

That night we ended up taking Callie home with us because she destroyed one of the blankets in her bed when Cass and I left her alone for all of 30 minutes. There were feathers EVERYWHERE from the down feathers in the blanket. We think she did it from the anxiety of being somewhere she wasn't familiar with and no one she knew was with her.

I promise more of the weekend is on it's way, but I'm going to get this up because I'm getting grief from my colleagues about there not being any new pictures up! Next post I'll have some "before 'n after" photos so stay tuned!

Whoa!!! Big Spider!

Cass and I decided tonight that we'd head on over to the house so I could mow the lawn and we could do a little yard work since the house's exterior needs a little sprucing up. So, we went in to the backyard to get the lawnmower and other things out of the shed. Cass was going to do some weeding in the beds and what not so I grabbed one of the half empty yard waste bags for her to use and brought it out of the shed. When Cass looked at the bag though, I thought she was having a heart attack or something. She gasped like I'd never heard her gasp before and said "Holy Cow!!! Ken look at this."

That's when I looked at the side of the bag facing away from me and found this!




The shot above kinda gives you a perspective on how big he was. This guy was probably a good 2-3 inches in diameter including it's legs. The only spider I've ever seen that was bigger than this one was in the Philippines! I gave the thing a real swift, strong swat with my sandle and it curled up into a little ball so I don't think we'll be seeing anymore of that creepy crawler.

Cass and I decided we're spraying some pesticide around the house this weekend. Yeeeahhhhh.

Day 6, 7, and 8 - Paint...Need We Say More?

We, probably don't HAVE to say much more, but I'm going to anyway.

Well, you'll have to forgive me for not posting what we did on Friday or Saturday, but Cass and I were at the house until around midnight both nights painting. So, when we got home, it was bedtime. Kind of like how I should be going to bed right now. Get ready, I'm sure this is going to be a long post.

So, this weekend was all about painting. On Friday evening after work, we went to Lowe's and bought the paint for the kitchen. We decided to paint a pale yellow color below the chair moulding and a sort of burnt orange color above it. We're eventually going to paint the cabinets the same yellow color as below the chair moulding. You'll get an idea of what it'll look like by looking at the end-product pictures a little later.

So we started off Friday night painting the lower portion of the walls the yellow color. Once again, a small victory got us all fired up to get moving on the greater project only to have that excitement shot down once again by how difficult the rest of the project is going to be. The two coats of yellow went up great. Nice and even finish. It looks awesome! Saturday, painting the orange walls? Yeaaah, not so much. It was unbelievable how uneven the first coat looked on the walls. The trim lines we painted stood out like a sore thumb, and to top it all off, a second coat of paint didn't completely fix that. We probably should have primed the walls or something, but oh well. Too late for that now!

The walls looked a hundred times better after putting on the second coat of orange, but we still had to figure out whether we wanted to just put another coat of orange up and hope it evens the rest of it out, or a while back when we were thinking about what to do with the kitchen, we thought about doing some kind of sponging or other textured finish. Well, we ended up deciding today that we were just going to put up a third coat of paint and hope it evens everything out.

Before we started on Saturday, we went to Lowe's again and got the paint we needed for our bedroom and living room. We pretty much kept almost the same colors as what we have in the bedroom at our apartment - which are medium dark tan and medium sage green - and we decided on a light khaki color for living room. Since we had to wait a while for the first coat of the orange to dry in the kitchen before we could do the second coat, we went upstairs to paint the tan color on the bedroom walls. We're painting the East and West facing walls the tan color and the North and South facing walls the green color. Since the North and South walls are the smaller walls in the room, the green will be more like an accent color and the tan will be the dominant color in the room. It should look pretty cool when we're done.

Today, after going to the house and doing a little thinking/imagining, we decided to just go with the third coat of orange paint. This coat, we think, did the trick. It was still a little hard to tell if the color was uneven because it was still drying, but the coverage looked pretty good. I'll try to take a photo of it when it's dry that does the color justice and post it later. All that's left to do in the kitchen is buy some new outlets, outlet covers, put the chair moulding back in place, paint the cabinets, and hang the new light fixtures. Nothing to it right? We'll just see about that...

While we were painting on Friday, I got a little careless and bumped my head against the yellow paint can and got some paint in my hair. Whoops! Later that night, I didn't realize the orange paint can's lid was laying on the floor right in front of me and I stepped in it! D'OH!

That's not half as funny as what happened on Saturday, though. Interestingly enough, Cass accidentally smeared the toes of her socks on a freshly painted area of the bedroom wall and got paint on her toes. Later on, doing the second coat of orange in the kitchen, she bumped her head on something that had orange paint on it, so she got orange in her hair. Look at the poor thing with her pouty face. What're the odds that I'd get paint on my head and toes on Friday and Cass does the same thing on Saturday? Crazy.

Here's a few more photos we snapped throughout the weekend.
Trimming out the kitchen took way longer than rolling it.


Yeah, lots of trimming.


Here's Cass wondering why I have to take another picture of her!


Here's my impression of a Dr. Pepper commercial. Our mortgage broker bought us a 6 pack of 1 liter bottles of Dr. Pepper and brought it to closing for us to celebrate! I can see why I never became an actor.

Day 5 - Prepping the Walls

Again with the boring posts, sorry. No new pictures. Cass and I washed all the walls we removed paper from so we should be buying the paint tonight and painting tomorrow, hopefully. We'll definitely remember the camera so we can take pictures.

I finally got the front lawn mowed. The grass was about a foot high in some places just like the backyard, so it needed it pretty bad, too.

Anyway, look for more pictures after this weekend. I'm sure there will be many more to post!

Day 4 - Wallpaper Victory

Finally! We got all the wallpaper off the walls in the rooms we're going to renovate before we move in. Sorry, we forgot the camera so there aren't any new pictures, but what we took down was the rest of the wallpaper behind the appliances, so the kitchen wouldn't look much different than the pictures in the last post anyway. We even got the walls washed with TSP, so we should be painting the kitchen this weekend. We "should" be. I (Ken) don't make any promises because I've already come to find out that you go into these kind of activities with a plan and promptly decide to do something else!

More will follow once we start painting. Stay tuned!

Day 3 - More Wallpaper

So...Cass and I will never...EVER...put up wallpaper in our house unless we are absolutely sure that we will never have to take it down ourselves! It is kind of a pain. On Sunday, we went to church and decided we'd head on over to the house afterward to do a little more wallpaper removal. We're still pumped about getting it all off the walls so that we can hopefully start painting this weekend.

I went ahead and got started on removing the rest of the wallpaper in the master bath. That probably took me about an hour. The bathroom is small and kind of awkward because the shower and the toilet are the only things in the room and the room is probably 6' x 6' square, roughly. The sink and vanity are separate, outside the bathroom.


After getting most of that done, Cass and I left to go have dinner with her parents since it was Mother's day and we hadn't seen them in a while. We drove out to Highland Township and had dinner with Mom, Dad, Chad, and Cooper. That was fun. Since it was an early dinner and we left the restaurant at 5pm, we decided we'd go back and remove the wallpaper in the Kitchen.


Before we tore it all down, the border in the kitchen had a bunch of fruit on it. This border was the same kind of wallpaper as what was in the master bedroom, it came down in two layers. Luckily, by then I was starting to get the hang of how to remove this stuff! We were able to get all the wallpaper borders down in less than half the time it took to get the bedroom wallpaper down. We had probably got about a quarter of the border down when Cass got a phone call from a friend and 15 minutes later when she came back, I was about 3/4 of the way done with the border. It was funny.

Then, it was time to start taking down the wallpaper below the chair moulding around the room. We took all the chair molding out and decided we'd try to leave the base board moudling on since it was kinda difficult to remove without damaging it. After we finally got that going we were able to take it down pretty fast, too. Now all that's left in terms of wallpaper is the sheets of wallpaper, like what was below the chair moulding, behind the appliances. We might actually get to wash walls and paint this weekend after all!

P.S. These tools are definitely essential for removing wallpaper. (Emphasis on the bandaids though. That scraper's sharp! OUCH! >.<)