Slowly but surely...

Here are some progress updates.  Don (Todd's stepfather) is here so we have been getting alot done!  He has been a HUGE HELP.  He has given me some great paint lessons and helped me fix my amateur kitchen cabinet debacle.  He helped us almost FINISH installing the hardwood floors!!  He tiled the laundry room, and mudded and sanded some of the old popcorn ceilings.  Here are some pics of what we have been working on...we will call these befores and durings because nothing is actually 100% finished yet.  These aren't that great either because I never take them from the same angle and it kind of throws off the effect.  When I take the final ones maybe I will try to do better!

Laundry room before (notice carpet and linoleum)

Laundry room during (at this point we still had to grout the tile)

 before

During...

Kitchen before...

Kitchen during...we got new hardware and rehung most of the doors tonight but obviously some of them still need to be painted.  There are a few that are finished though and they look great!

Popcorn before...

Smooooooooooooooth!

Fireplace before...

Fireplace during...don't worry this is only primer, the final coats will look much better. (I hope).

And this is the poor neglected pup who needs a haircut!

This weekend we are hoping to finish the floors in both guest rooms and start painting and putting the baseboards on.  The floors look great but they made the walls look even more yellow, so it will make a huge difference when we finish painting the walls.  You can see the options we have on the wall in this picture...

Stay tuned!

Rockstar

I thought I would update you guys on our progress.  Alot has gone on the past few days even though it doesn't really look like it in these pics.  One of the biggest surprises (for me at least) out of this whole project was how long it took to prep the subfloor.  I was definitely naive enough to envision just rolling up the carpet and gluing down some hardwood.  Umm not so much!  We were lucky enough to have my wonderful brother-in-law come visit us for a long weekend and he helped us get alot of the dirty work done...he was a total rockstar and worked extremely hard while he was here.  I kind of felt bad, but not really because we def need all the help we can get :)  Here was his first job...

No it is not snowing inside our house.  This is just a beautiful photo of the drywall dust we were breathing in all day.  Another little awesome fact I was previously unaware of...after you scrape the popcorn ceilings there is still some residue that gets stuck all over it.  Also, some of the drywall tape gets peeled away and the places you nick have to be sanded before you can paint.  I learned this lesson the hard way after deciding to skip this step (because I was over it) and just go ahead and paint the laundry room.  I will not be posting a pic of that because it is pretty embarrassing--but just know that the sanding is definitely a necessary step.  Thankfully Chad decided to go after this first thing and got a couple of ceilings sanded.  They look amazing!

Meanwhile, I decided to attack all of that glue that I posted about before that was stuck all over the floor from the old carpet.  I got some acid from Lowe's and spent the entire morning pouring it on and then scraping and rubbing over it with a scrub brush and vacuuming it up.  Enter my new best friend....THE SHOP VAC!  I could devote another entire post to how much I now love that thing but I will spare you guys.  I also decided to clear everything out to make room for the big floor installation.  I was pretty proud of my hard work when the room looked like this...

Unfortunately a mere couple of hours later it looked like this

so my happiness was obviously short lived.  As you can see from this photo, I kind of had to abandon the kitchen cabinet project in the middle which brings me to another valuable lesson learned.  After Chad and I finished the ceilings and glue scraping, it was time to work on all chipping up the tile in the kitchen.  Yet another really fun miserable demo project.  When we were done, there was still mortar stuck all over the floor.  To make a long story short, we rented a concrete grinder but it didn't really help all that much so we Chad had to go around the whole kitchen with this little tool called a drimmel (I'm sure I'm not spelling that right at all) and chip it all up.  I tried to help by sucking as much dust out of the air as I could with the shop vac but it was still a huge mess.  And while using this tool the bottom of the cabinets got all beat up and have to be repainted and everything is filthy and has to be cleaned again.  Which brings me to the lesson...PAINT AFTER DEMO.

Anyway, thats enough about prepping the subfloor.  I'm sure you get that it is a long and dirty project.  Onto the somewhat fun part.  Jerry came over to help Todd and Chad figure out how to lay out the floors so that everything would be square with the walls.  There were all sorts of measurements and tools involved and eventually they had a starting point.

So, they started laying down the floors in the master bedroom.  It is definitely not hard skill-wise, but it is extremely time-consuming.  You have to spread the glue on the floor in little strips

and then you have to make cuts around all the walls using this thing...I'm still not sure what it's actual name is but they let me use it and it was really fun!

My other job was to go after them and wipe up any excess glue...not so fun.  Anyway, at the end of 2 days we had this...

and now I just can't wait to do the rest of the house.  Hopefully this weekend we will finish the floors in the kitchen and get some appliances in early next week!

In a couple of other un-floor related updates...

This is the trash pile we have going on in front of the house right now.  I'm slightly concerned that the neighbors are going to hate us before we even meet them.

THIS giant hole in the wall is the beginning of our new master walk-in closet...apparently the walls are going to be built tomorrow so I will post more pics when I get them!

Meanwhile...

In case any of you were wondering what Todd was doing while my mom and I were working on these cabinets, he was busy with lots of not so fun projects.  #1 we he had to rip up all of the carpet to get ready to install the hardwood floors.  That task required him to be on his hands and knees for hours prying up about 8 million of these

which as you can see from this photo he was not loving.  We were excited when we first discovered that the carpet was only tacked down around the sides of the room because that would make it really easy to pull up and roll out.  Then he discovered this minor problem...

They apparently used a ridiculous amount of glue to attach the underlayment to the concrete which as you can see leaves a bunch of junk on the floor when you pull it up.  We somehow have to remove all of this before we can put the floors in (booooooo) but more on that later.

He also did alot of other necessary demo projects like removing the painted over giant mirrored closet doors from all the rooms and this which I am really excited about...

Check out the corner over by the kitchen---it went from this

to this...

making room for our new breakfast bar!  It really opens up the room and makes it look alot roomier--also we will be able to add seating which will be great since the room is on the small side. 

He also made time during all this hard work for a little "fun" project--which was obviously fun because he got to use one of his big power tools.

I have to say I was very impressed when in about an hour or so he took two of our boring naked windows from this

to this...

You can't really tell how great it looks from these pictures but once everything is painted it will make a huge difference!

I'm sure you noticed the paint swatches on the wall in a few of these photos.  More on the paint picking dilemna dilemma later...!

Side note-I was always taught that the spelling of that word is dilemna, but after a quick google search before I posted this just to make sure I had it right it turns out that the actual spelling is dilemma and I am not the only person who didn't know that.  Anyone else?

K is for Kitchen

We happen to be learning about the letter K this week in preschool and everytime one of my kids says "Mrs. Potter Mrs. Potter kitchen starts with K!!" all I can think about it is the demolition derby we have going on in our house right now.  We started project #1 in the kitchen-cabinet painting- and thanks to my mom we were able to get alot done the past few days.  She sanded all the cabinet doors and the parts in the kitchen...

Then we filled the holes with putty, washed them. and primed them with some oil based primer.  While the doors were drying we went in and primed the cabinets and then came back and put the first coat of paint on everything.  Here are some action shots for you

Yes I realize I am sideways but it is after work and I am too tired to go back and flip it and reupload so just turn your head ;)

So then we had this...

and this...

My mom went back to the house while I was at work on Monday and put a second coat of paint on the backs of the doors.  I wanted to let them dry for at least 3 days so tomorrow I will flip them over and paint 2 coats on the fronts.  They say to let them dry for at least 5 days before rehanging them but hopefully next weekend I will have an after picture.  I still need to pick out new hardware also...any ideas?