Goodbye Primer, Hello Paint!

Pictures! We are about 95% done with priming. We've left a few areas that are now "low priority" to finish last. Mainly the mudroom, "garage", and 3rd bathroom. We figured that they would be easy area to finish after we move in so we are kind of ignoring them for now.

Does anyone else see the heart in this photo?

Before: It's definitely not my style.

After: (In progress) The kitchen has come so far from it's dull brown!

I never thought I'd be so happy to paint! I finally got to put a color on the bedroom walls last night. I'm amazed at how much the house has changed. What started out as me thinking "I could never live here..." has turned into "Hey, are house it going to look pretty good." It's amazing what a lot of paint and a lot of TLC can do.

A World of White

I've learned a valuable lesson in the last week. When you are painting with a shellac based primer and your head is stuck inside of the cabinet you are priming, don't take a deep breath through your mouth. You'll thank me for my pearls of wisdom someday.

Aside from that the house is almost completely primed. At least with the first coat of primer. We are busting out the paint gun tonight so I'm pretty pumped about that. We are spraying the second coat of primer on the the trim, doors, and cabinets. We had to roll the first coat because it was a shellac based primer, but we're using a water based for the second coat so it's on like Donkey Kong! This should go so much faster. Hopefully we'll be painting with actual colors by the end of the week. Sarah helped me pick out most of our colors, so we're pretty set for most of the rooms.

Living Areas- Ben Moore Stonington Gray
Bedroom- Ben Moore Seattle Mist
Master Bath- Sherwin Williams Passive
Guest Room- Either Sherwin Williams Otter or Sea Salt

Next step after painting is floors. The plan right now is to get the main areas completely painted, such as the 2 living rooms, kitchen, and dining room, so that Brad can start on floors while I finish up painting in the other rooms.

It seems so simple when I write it, but the whole process takes so long. The goal was originally to be in the house by the beginning of December, but that doesn't seem likely right now. *Sigh* This also means that even though we were thinking we'd avoid having the new pup in the old house, that doesn't seem likely either. So now we have a giant dog crate sitting in our bedroom and we still haven't packed a single thing. Most days the current house looks like a disaster relief zone. Lucky for me, the cleaning lady comes today.

Oh, and I promise to have some updated pictures soon.

Prep work is the Devil!

Who knew cleaning and taping could take so much time! We are trying to get the entire house prepped to be painted so that the painting goes faster, but between taping plastic on the windows and scraping boogers off the walls it's going so slow! (Yes, you read boogers correctly. Children are dirty little creatures.) Not to mention that we are using ammonia to clean which smells like cat pee and makes the whole experience that much more fun.

We have 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and the mud room left. It doesn't sound like much, but a small part of me wants to cry when I look at it. Then I look out the window and our beautiful property and remember why we are doing this.

An another up note, we met our neighbors and they aren't scary at all, which is a big plus! They are actually really nice. Leo apparently gets bored easily and offered to knock down our field and all of the backyard that didn't ever get mowed by Fannie Mae's people. He's also going to chop up the downed tree in the front yard that we haven't gotten to. I'm all for neighbors getting bored and doing manual labor that I don't have to.

And then there's paint colors. For some reason I am having quite a time of picking out colors I like. Not sure what is going on. I'm normally pretty decisive about things like this. It's not that I'm unsure of the shade or something, I have no idea what color I want anywhere except for the main area. Color me frustrated.

One Step Closer...

Just a quick update...

We are so close to painting! The carpet and padding are all out. The floors are now nail and staple free and I have the blisters to prove it. We've pulled all the cabinet doors off and gotten the handles removed. I've got a couple of paint samples on the wall to see which color we are going to choose. Just the small patches of primer that we have up give me faith that the walls will look sooooo much better. I think I'll do a happy dance when all the floral print is gone.

We decided to replace the beautiful chair rail in our bedrooms and the one entry room with normal squared off chair rail. It'll be a little bit more expensive, but I think we will like it a lot better. Tonight we'll be prepping and measuring for that. Hopefully by the end of the weekend the walls will be ready for primer and the cabinets, doors and trim will be prepped as well. If you fell like sanding something give me a shout. We've got plenty to go around.

The Wall Dilemma

I've been scouring the internet for ideas for the walls.

Mobilehomeliving.org has become my new favorite website. A lot of what I've seen has been to either texturize the walls or use bead board and go with a board and batten look. I like the clean lines of the bead board, but it's a bit more of a country look which I'm not loving so much. I love the idea of a more modern board and batten/wainscot look, but thinking about the mass amount of trim boards we would have to buy kind of make my head spin. I think it would be a great way to not only hide the wall strips, but also make the interior look a bit more "us".

For the floors we've decided to try plywood. We are planning on ripping sheets of plywood into 1' x 8' boards and laying (lying? Danica?) it like a normal hardwood floor. After the floors are down we are going to stain then a dark brown/black color and then probably poly over them for durability.
I found a tutorial for someone did the same thing. They ended up leaving them natural, which I really like the look of, but I'm a little over having light colored floors. I found a blog with a picture of a stain color which they called Kona Brown that I really liked. Hopefully it will look the same on fresh plywood. I'm going to do a practice run with a few different options and see how it goes.

The last major change we are planning is painting all of the cabinets. The kitchen cabinets are going to be white and I think I'm going to end up paining the counter tops a dark gray. They are this hideous combination of blue, gray, and pink right now and I just don't thinks that's going to work for us. Oh, and I'm crossing my finger for a new kitchen sink. My list just keeps getting longer and longer it seems. Every day I wake up and hope that a little magic fairy is going to have visited the new house and completed my entire wish list for me and every day I'm disappointed. Maybe tomorrow?

Popcorn Free

The ceiling have been de-popcorned! It wasn't nearly as bad as I was expecting and the drywall underneath was in much better condition than we thought it would be, so bonus for us. We were going to do a knockdown texture on the ceiling but have decided to keep them smooth instead. It equals a lot less work for us and we'd rather have smooth ceilings anyway. To say I'm happy is an understatement.

The popcorn was very easy to remove. All we did was take a normal weed sprayer, fill it with water, spray down a section of the ceiling, let it sit for about a minute, then started scraping with a normal 6" mud knife. It was cake. If you have popcorn ceilings that you've been dreaming of getting rid of, do it! The only downside is that it is extremely messy. Since we were ripping the carpet out anyway we didn't put anything down on it. As soon as we were finished with a room, we would cut the carpet, roll it up, and away goes the mess.

I did try to keep the kitchen some what clean. I got a huge roll of painters plastic and covered all of the cabinets as well as the floor since we are just going to put the new flooring over the existing laminate. Covering everything up was probably the most time consuming part of the whole process. It worked great though and was very easy to clean up.

Do you see the nastyness that is popcorn ceilings. It's like a breeding ground for dust covered cobwebs. When I was scraping them there was literally cobwebs that would get knocked down and just hang from the ceiling. Uck!

The mess! When I was done it looked like it had snowed in the house. The other downside was that if we didn't roll up the carpet right away, the next day all the plaster had dried and every time you stepped on it there was a constant cloud of drywall dust. I definitely recommend taking it out as soon as you are done while it is still damp.

Aw, the finished product. The ceiling aren't completely perfect, but they are so much better. I'm excited to see how they look when they are a completely patched and painted.

Next up, you get to see the house without any carpet, padding or fans before we prime EVERYTHING. For the past few days we've been taking down all the light fixtures, getting rid of any remaining carpet, removing that terrible cabinet over the bar in the kitchen, and earning plenty of blisters pulling up carpet staples.

Till then.

It begins...

Last night was our first night of demo in the new house. Also, it was Alfie's first trip to his future home. It didn't take him too long to discover that the windows are now the perfect height for him. Pretty sure his world is going to be changed forever. It also didn't' take him very long to discover the chickens in the neighbors yard. I have a feeling they are going to meet him a little more up close and personal than they would like.
We didn't get a ton done as we had limited time, but we did manage the get out locks changed out and started scraping off some of the popcorn ceilings. I started int he closets to see what condition the drywall underneath was in and was pleasantly surprised to find that it looks fantastic. I'm hoping we can get away with not texturizing them at all and going with a smooth ceiling finish. Here are some before shots of the house to commemorate our first day of work. Also, so we don't forget just how far we've come.

This is the master bedroom. 

Master Bath. I know, the carpet in the bathroom is fantastic.

Our beautiful double sinks.

Front room. No idea what we're going to do with it.

Front room leading into the dining room/kitchen area.

Same place, better shot.

Future site of our kitchen table. Don't you just love the wallpaper pattern!

The kitchen, which is quite roomy. (Yes, Alfie feels the need to be seen in every photo.)

My lovely popcorn ceiling.

First room to be de-popcorned by yours truly.

Goodbye carpet! It only gets better from here!

Closing. Three Weeks Later.

The closing in itself has been an adventure. We've had four closing dates and 3 date changes. After having the Title company come back to us every week with something new that they needed signed (apparently the Title company was unsure of what they needed to process the title), we finally closed yesterday. Brad went back to work for an hour and I ran around town trying to come some stuff done on the new place.

We have REMC now, which is cool, but I had to go in person to get it switched to our name. After about an hour of running around Brad and I were going to meet at the new place, have a quick drink, then head over to Cam & Misty's to finish canning.

I got to the property before Brad and saw a red truck backed up to my front door. I got out of my truck and politely asked one of the men what they were doing and he informed me they were winterizing the property. My property. My new property that I have to move into in 2 months. Luckily I got there right as they were finishing (read the sarcasm) and asked him (Joe) if he could not winterize the property, which he had just finished winterizing. Sigh. I hate Fannie Mae a little bit. Who orders a winterization (is that even a word?) on a property that is closing? Frustration thy name is Fannie Mae. The workers politely packed up their stuff and shipped out. They were nice and it wasn't their fault. They were just doing their job. Brad finally shows up and I tell him what was going on. As we attempt to flush the pipes we realized that Joe did not in fact turn the water back on like he said. Joy! So, off Brad goes to crawl around under the house to turn the pump on and all the fun that comes along with that. After about 10 minutes he comes back inside, without success, and informs me that some one has stolen our air condenser for the AC. Double Joy!

This is where I proceeded to break down and cry.

Not the most encouraging thing when you have just bought a new property. Sometimes a person just gets a bit overwhelmed with it all. As Brad was in the crawl I was walking through the house tallying up all the things we need to do. There is a lot to do.

I'm off to make my list.

I'm on the Hunt

For cheap yet cool remodel ideas. I'm realizing that 1800+ sq ft is quite a large area to work with. Plus, the "things we want to change" list keeps getting longer and longer and longer. Here's where we started...

1. New floor in the main areas
2. Paint main area walls and add batten to seams
3. Paint kitchen cabinets

Here is the list now, just a week or so later...

1. Remove popcorn ceiling and texturize
2. Replace flooring in the whole house
3. Prime and paint whole house and add batten to seams and trim to floorboards
4. Remove section of kitchen cabinet and refinish all cabinets
5. Refinish and paint cabinets in master bath and paint counter tops

This doesn't even count the things we've decided to do to our current house. Like... "hey, let's remodel that bathroom that we've never used so that someone else can use it."

Also, I need a good yet modern chicken coop plan. One that can house 15-20 chickens.

Any help is appreciated.

Another Adventure Begins

We're starting another adventure, so I'm starting a new blog to try and keep a record of it all. I didn't do this with the first house and I kind of regret it. Also, I think this is going to be interesting to go back and read someday...

Brad is really treating me right for our 5 year anniversary. We're buying a Double Wide. Yes, I did us a cap D and cap W. From here on out our new place will be referred to as The DW. Most the time you tell someone that you are buying a new house they think you're upgrading. I wouldn't describe this as an upgrade. The DW isn't one of those fancy, top of the line manufactured homes. I'd call it more of a Kia. It gets the job done, but it's not very ambitious. We're hoping to change all that.

Observe DW in all it's glory. It's not much to look at. Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm a little frightened to actually post the pictures that I have of the inside. This is definitely not where I saw us 5 years ago. I've been scouring the internet and after countless hours reading blogs and looking at other people pictures of their before and after I think it has some potential. I think it could actually be nice. But the DW isn't really what caught our attention. Though it does have a pool... I don't think I mentioned that. No, what made us say "hey, we should buy this DW" was the beautiful 20 acres that it sits on.

20 acres! Half of it is wooded, the rest is a field and a yard. And the best part... It's just outside of town! I don't know how you get better than this, well, maybe without the DW it would be a little better, but we're going to make things happen. It's going to be the best little DW you've ever seen. Some new floors, some paint, some blood, sweat, and maybe even a few tears later it's going to be us. Oh, and I've been promised a puppy, which makes this whole thing even cooler. Also, the neighbors have a goat. Goats are pretty cool in my book. I'm pretty sure the goat and I are going to be the best of friends.

That's all for now folks. Closing is supposed to be at the end of next month, so between now and then I'll probably post about all the updates we're finally doing to our current house so that we can move out. Cause everyone knows that you always wait until you're moving to do all the things you've been meaning to do. Such is life.