The Stevens Family

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

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.

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...

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!

No really, he did. :)

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.

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." :)

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 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.