Photo update... Long overdue

 After beating my head against the wall on what color to do our bathroom in I finally gave it over the Brad to decide. He went quite a bit darker than I would have gone, but it's all painted now and I absolutely love the color.

 Prepping the floors to make sure there weren't any screws or large bumps to cause problems.

           

 My beautiful cabinet doors. One more coat of paint and they're ready to put back on the cabinets, which shiny new hardware of course.

 Our first plank down! It was a very intense moment for us.

 The rest is pretty self explanatory. Floors, floors, and more floors. Hopefully by the end of this weekend I'll have some pictures of what it looks like stained. Here's keeping our fingers crossed.

I Am a Blogging Liar

I promised photos, like forever ago. I'm a liar as well as a terrible blogger. Such is life.

Status of things....

Floors are coming a long nicely. We probably have over 1/3 of the house done. Here are a few pictures to tide you over. They are taken from my phone so I apologize for the quality. When we are completely done with the floors I may post a tutorial on how we did them. 

I'm really thrilled with how they look so far. Actually, I'm pretty thrilled with how the entire house looks so far. We are staining the floors with Minwax Ebony (pictured below) and then most likely going to seal them with a product called Bona Mega Clear HD.

We bought all new appliances the other week also. The idea of having the washer I've always dreamed of has really motivated me to get all of this stuff done. The walls are painted, the ceilings are done, the kitchen cabinets are 85% complete, and the floors are well on their way. I really will try to get some comprehensive house photos up soon. I was looking at some of the first house photos and I can't believe how different things look. Also, power tools are super fun.

Filler, but Fun.

So, I've been a total slacker about taking photos of the new place to update the blog. Honestly, we haven't had nearly as much time to work on it as we'd like. We're done painting the main living areas and our bedroom. Started painting our bathroom and the color I had picked that was called "Smoke" ended up looking like pink sand, so we promptly stopped. I'm still hunting down that perfect color...

In the meantime, we finally got the boards for our floors. Menards was having a really good sale on 1/4" Birch veneer plywood so we took full advantage and ordered a bunk. We then had the boards ripped into 1" x 8" planks which we are planning on laying down like a normal hardwoord floor. We're going to glue & nail each board, fill in any large cracks, stain the floors a nice black/brown, poly over them, and call it a day.
Easy right? Here is a quick picture of the floors. I promise to take plenty of photos tonight so you can get an idea of how things are looking.

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.