Kitchen update, LOTS of pictures!

Finally, an update! Sorry for lagging a bit on updating the blog, but life has been keeping us pretty busy. We've been hard at work in the kitchen, it's actually starting to resemble more of a room now. Josh and I had spent the previous week trying to clear out the kitchen, and find permanent homes for a lot of our construction related objects. My Uncle Perry was hard at work (as usual) getting a lot of our electrical wired in. This past weekend my mom, Uncle, Josh, Jayden and I all worked on getting up as much of the drywall as we could. We got a lot farther than I thought we would! We still need to do the ceiling, which is going to be a lot of work. Josh and I are both against drywalling it ourselves, because that is just the worst job imaginable in our minds. So, we're either going to do a plank ceiling or we're going to hire the guys that did the rest of our ceilings to come in and do this room too.
I realize that I haven't given much a "flashback" post on the kitchen progress. So I thought I'd show a few pictures of our progress, from start to now to get you all a little bit more up to speed. I'm trying to post pictures that are all taken from two different viewpoints, so it doesn't get too confusing. The kitchen has been by far the biggest project in the house. We (meaning mostly my Uncle Perry) replaced the floor, the ceiling including beams, and the entire East wall.

This is what it looked like looking Northeast in the Kitchen when we first bought it. Our current kitchen space was originally a kitchen, a weird room (the room this pic was taken in) and a full bath.
This is in the original kitchen area, looking Southeast.

This is after we began demo (duh!) looking Northeast, and the bathroom wall, and the wall separating the kitchen from the weird room was starting to come down.
Looking Northeast all of the walls are down, and we're completely gutted.

Looking Northeast again, the new two by fours here are a brace that my Uncle Perry built to hold up the house so we could tear off the back wall without the rest of the house caving in.

Looking Southeast after the wall was down (duh again, sorry, I explain in detail because I get confused easily myself).

Looking Northeast after we started fixing the floor. We tore up one side, and Perry replaced the floor joists because they were in horrible shape after rotting, and being cut through for various pipes and wires so much. After he fixed that side, we tore up the rest of the room and put down 8" wide pine floorboards.

Looking Northeast after the floors had been replaced, and we started building the wall for the half bath.


And FINALLY we get to this past weekend. You thought I was kidding when I said Jayden helped out, didn't you? He made sure everything was good and level.

Here we are, looking Northeast. Isn't the drywall pretty? It's practically ready for the cabinets!


And, once again, because kids are cute and I think it's the best way to end a post, here is a picture of Jayden and my nephew Ethan. They are becoming the best of pals!

That is all for today, and if you are still actually reading what I've written rather than just looking at pictures...thanks for reading! Feel free to leave a comment so I know who's lurking out there!

Back to the kitchen

Now that the bathroom is up and running, we finally get to shift our concentration over to the kitchen. First on our agenda in the kitchen: clear it out so we can have some space to work in. Currently we've got all of our tools, appliances, boards, drywall, paint, and anything else we don't want in the main area of the house, thrown into this room. So, the only real thing we're going to work on this weekend is finding new places for all of this stuff.



Meanwhile, we decided to get a little fancy for lunch and break out the George. I had to borrow Jayden's play spatula though, because the plastic stuff we use daily would have become part of the sandwich.

Some day, we'll look back at this picture and be thankful for our counter tops, real plates, kitchen utensils that won't melt, and a stove top.

Holy highlighter!

What was supposed to be "Soothing Aloe" turned out to be more of a blinding green highlighter color. I was leery of it at first, but we kept painting because I haven't liked any of the colors we've painted when we first started painting, but I love them all now. I gotta say, the color is growing on me more and more. I've started putting some stuff in the bathroom, I've put up the clock and the medicine cabinet is up, and it's all helped tremendously. Pictures don't really do a color justification. Much of the woodwork still needs a second coat, some of the trim pieces need to be put up, and we still have to get the light up...but we're VERY close to being done with this room.

I did manage to finish my chairs. I'm pretty happy with them, with the material included, they were only $2.00 each. :)

My mom did all of the plastering on the walls and ceiling, and she sanded much of them too. This is what happens when you spend some time sanding ceilings.

And because it's always nice to end the post with a cute kid, here's our adorable neice doing her rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star


Saturday Progress

We're making pretty good leeway on our list of things to accomplish with the house this weekend. The sanding in each bathroom is almost complete, and the hallway is pretty much ready to be painted. We got a lot of the woodwork primered, and an actual coat of paint! It's going to take at least one more coat though, because the ugly brown paint doesn't want to go away. I apoligize for the pictures...its really hard to take a decent shot in such small rooms. This is a picture of the little sitting room/hallway/nook. Not really sure what it is. Notice the lovely dark brown paint. This paint was all through the upstairs, on the wainscoting in the bathroom, and accented by lovely brown shag carpet in the bathroom also.

Here is is after a little paint. It really brightened it up! The door knob is temporary, I had to take all of the hardware off, so I stuck in the ugly painted knob so we could open up the attic door still.

Here is a shot of our window, minus the woodwork and window sill.

Here is the window with new woodwork. Not all of the woodwork was salvagable because it was in such bad shape, so we had to put up a few new pieces. Sorry for the washout look.

As always, Jayden was eager to help....by keeping us on our toes. Anything he sees us doing, he's gotta do.


And because giggles are a great way to end the day...here's Jayden giggling at his mama acting stupid.

Weekend Checklist

Well, the bank is coming on Tuesday so we can get the ball rolling on turning our Construction Loan into a Mortgage. For those of you who don't know, if you buy a house that you plan on renovating before you actually live there, you can usually get a Construction Loan. A Construction Loan is the same type of loan people get when they're building a new home, basically you are approved of a certain amount of credit, usually a bit below what the appraised value of the home will be once it is finished. From there, you use a checking account out of the Construction Loan, and the loan goes up as you write checks. Once the construction is finished, you turn your loan into a mortgage and start making your typical mortgage payments. We've had our house for fifteen months now, and still have not had to make one mortgage payment. Does that make any sense at all? I only write about this because it seems like a lot of people have never heard of this, and it keeps them from buying "fixer uppers."
That being said, we've really got to get moving this weekend. The bank is going to want to see a house that will bring them back the amount of the loan should they ever have to sell it (Lord help us that that won't happen!). Our bank is very small town and personable, so they won't be hard on us or anything, but I still want it to look as nice as possible. So, here is the list of things that should be done by next Tuesday:
  • Sand, primer, and paint the upstairs bathroom, sitting room (I don't know if it counts as a sitting room, but that's what I'm going to call it from now on!) and the downstairs bathroom. This will give us two more rooms that are almost completed!
  • Primer and paint the woodwork in both bathrooms, and sitting room outside of upstairs bath.
  • Hang medicine cabinets in both bathrooms.
  • Get as much woodwork put up as possible. This is a pretty big job, but it needs to be done sooner or later.
  • Finish putting away the Christmas stuff. Yeah, I'm a bit late getting there. But it's really hard to gather it all up when you've got a one year old stashing half the stuff in with his toys! We need to take the Christmas tree to the landfill, I'm sure our neighbors love seeing it laying out on our front porch.
  • Something that really doesn't "need" to be done but I'd like it to be done: finish painting the chairs that will go in said sitting room, and finish painting the other little pieces of furniture that will go in the upstairs bath. I know my mom will scoff at me wanting to do those things because they aren't all that important...It'll just make it feel more lived in.
  • Clean up the yard, we have two sizable piles of demolition stuff that we need to get rid of. But, with the storm coming, who knows if we'll be able to tackle it this weekend.
  • And of course, the obvious cleaning stuff. This probably won't happen until Monday, because if I do it now, I'll have to do it all over again after a weekend of working on the house. The work makes such a mess.

So, that's that. Wish us luck! Hopefully I'll be reporting back this weekend with positive results and pretty pictures...hopefully...

All prettied up

Well, the tub is completely done. It's been painted, and touched up, and new handles and whatnot. If I may say so myself, it looks great. Jayden had first honors at getting a bath. He could hardly wait to get in!



As you can see...Jayden loved it.

No really, he did. :)

We have a bathtub!

8:25 AM by Anonymous 0 Comments
As of last night we had a real, working bathtub. Woohoo!
It's scrubbed, and the outside is primered...all we need is some new faucet handles.

Josh, turning on the faucet for the first time.

A little bit closer to a bath...

It's been a very long day, but we're finally getting somewhere with the bathroom upstairs. I was primarily working on laundry, about ten loads of it, while everyone else worked on various jobs. Josh put some lights up in our closet (yay!) and started getting Jayden's closet light up. My mom came over today and did some more plastering, sanded, helped with the electrical, set our toilette AND painted on the bead board a bit. She's currently at home working on our house....the lady doesn't stop. My uncle came up and drilled the holes for all of the pipes and helped us figure out some of the electrical. He's also drawing up some plans and an estimate for the built in book shelves in the family room. We're hoping to have enough splurge money from our tax return to go ahead and have those put in. Jayden helped us with everything.
Now that the holes are drilled, my brother is working with Josh on getting all of the pipes ran up and through the holes. I think he's planning on finishing it up tonight, so we'll be able to hook up all of the stuff in the bathroom tomorrow! That means a toilet UPSTAIRS, a sink that's actually big enough to wash stuff in (I still love you pretty little corner sink), and yes, a bathtub! Our very own bathtub. *sigh*

In other news, Jayden isn't getting one tooth like I originally thought...he's getting 3 or 4. So that explains all of his sleepless nights. He's also been a huge help around the house. Always jumping in while we're working on something with his hammer or drill to give us a hand. It's a great "help." :)

Jayden's Room Updated

Here are a few pictures of the progress up to today of Jayden's room. I don't have a picture of it from the very beginning, it had shag carpet on top of many layers of flooring, and the closet was absolutely disgusting. We've still got a few things to do in here, such as: nail down the quarter round that has been ready to be nailed down for months now, finish some spots on his floor, put up shelving, and a few more painting touch ups. Then we'll be DONE with a ROOM. Craziness.


Here's a shot of the floor looking Southeast after we had been tearing up some of the old linoleum. NOT a fun job. It didn't help that there were thousands of nails that we had to pull up so we could paint his floor. I thought painting his floor would be a cost effective and easy thing to do for a kids room, plus great for playing with cars and Lego's. But, in order to paint we had to tear up ever bit of flooring, pull up every nail, fill every hole and every crack, primer, paint twice.... not all that easy.

Another shot looking southeast. We're down to the pine boards here, and starting on the walls.

This is in Jayden's closet. I was actually proud of the way it looked here, because it looked so bad before hand. I can't find a picture of what it looked like, I think because I tried to steer clear of this room as much as possible. To give you an idea, the previous owner had buckets on top of the built in drawers to hold all of the water and debris that came in through the ceiling and walls. The buckets had been there for years, and were green and grimy and gross.

This is looking Northeast. It's after we had the heat and air installed, and we had to build around the pipes. I'm planning on putting in floor to ceiling shelving in the nook there.

Here it is looking Southeast again, after we'd painted the floors, walls, and most of the woodwork.

This is in his closet again. Doesn't it look so nice and clean? The ceiling and some of the walls were replaced. The walls we didn't replace were replastered. I love it :)
Here it is today, looking Southeast.
Here it is looking Northeast, and the partially built shelving we desperately need since Jayden received every toy imaginable at Christmastime.
Looking South. We just put up his window treatments last weekend. I have to difficult of a time picking out window treatments for one room, let alone an entire house. But, we're getting there.
That's all for Jayden's room!
Hopefully, my brother and uncle will be coming over tomorrow night to help us get our upstairs bath up and running. Yeah, you heard it. Running. Like, with water. A BATH, if you will. Le sigh...Oh the luxury.

Kid's bath update

11:32 AM by Anonymous 0 Comments
More pictures! Woohoo! Here is what we call the "Kid's Bath"...even though we only have one kid, who isn't even potty trained, and probably won't be having a "Grown up Bath" for another year or two. I have no pictures of the upstairs before we started all of the construction. So, you'll have to deal with pictures of stuff that's actually been modified by us a bit.


This is the original sink on the East wall. The house was built by a prominent plumber, so it is original to the house. We did take it down though, partially because its a kids bathroom and there is no way that sink would survive that, and it's just not our taste. We still have the sink, and are planning on selling it, we just haven't gotten that far yet.

This was the antique hot water heater on the East wall, we kept it too out of of hopes of us finding something really cool to do with it. So far, no luck. We were originally going to keep it up for decoration, but we had tear out the chimney that it sets next to because the chimney was causing structural damage.

This is the tub on the North wall. It had a wall thing built all around it, you can see it in the right portion of the picture. Notice the shag carpeting in the bathroom? Nice.

This is after the chimney was taken down. Sadly, the toilette didn't survive.

As with many rooms, we had to pretty much gut this one completely. This is facing the East wall, where the sink, water heater, and chimney used to set. We also tore up the floor and replaced it with a newer pine flooring.


This is the bathroom today, facing the East wall. We moved the sink over to the South wall because it gave the bathroom a better flow. We weren't able to save the original wainscoting because it had been built around the chimney, and it was going to be more trouble than it was worth. So, we put up some new bead board instead. Nothing in this bathroom is hooked up yet.

Here is the tub, on the North wall still. We just flipped it around so we could have the option of installing a shower easier.

These are the colors I'm looking at for the bathroom. Since its a Kids Bathroom, I wanted something a little more colorful.


Our almost done ceiling! Josh, my mom, and my Uncle Perry put this up. My mom has been patching it, and we'll just have to sand it when we sand the walls. You all should know how much we love sanding by now!
That's all for this bathroom. Hopefully we'll have many more updates to display soon. Like a working tub. I can't stop thinking about a working tub...

Half bath updates

9:00 AM by Anonymous 0 Comments
Pictures! I thought I'd update you all on a few rooms that are coming along from the start up until today. The first being the half bath. It still has a lot of work to be done, but it has come a long way! It's the only room in the house with running water (besides the washer in the basement), and its only cold water right now.

This is looking North, back when the half bath was a full bath. In case you didn't know, the house was converted to a duplex in the 1950's, so we had a full bath and a kitchen on both floors.

Looking South, before construction.


One of the first parts of the house to face demolition.

The entire back wall of the house was so rotten, that we had to completely tear it off and replace it. This is after all of the bathroom walls came down, and the new size window was installed.

These are the walls being built after the back wall was completed, and the new pine floor was put down.

This is a shot of the bathroom today. With the working sink and toilette. We still have a lot of painting to do, but its coming along nicely.

Our sink. One of our "Lowes Specials"
I'll do a seperate post on all of that stuff someday :)

Our ceiling...or lack of ceiling. No lights yet either.

Thats our half bath up to today! I'd like to think that it will be done soon, but since its actually somewhat functional, I think other rooms will take a higher priority over this room for now (our full bath and kitchen, for instance).