Get'er Done

We had such a busy weekend! Tons got accomplished (mostly thanks to Mark and our good friend Ryan).

First and foremost, I can no longer refer to our abode as the "Peach Palace" because Mark and Ryan painted the house! It is now painted Dunn Edwards' "Floating Lily Pad." It looks like a completely different house!
Sometime in the next few years, I would like to add a stone facade to the bottom half of the front of the house. Something like this. We also plan to eventually get a new front door. We're thinking a dark wood with wrought iron details.

Next on the list, Ryan helped install some under-cabinet lighting in the kitchen. I call it the "I'm not waiting up for you" light.

We also finally got the mirror back up in our guest bathroom. Remember that snafu we had with the mold behind the mirror that I discovered when I was prepping the mirror for molding? That wasn't the molding I was going for... We fixed all of the problems, but the mirror had been sitting in our hallway for over six months. Well no more! I repainted the new drywall, and Mark and Ryan got the mirror and the molding up, and it looks fantastic! We also finally hung a towel bar and a hook so that towels don't have to be draped over the shower curtain rod.

I also spent some time sanding and painting cabinet doors for the bathroom, Mark installed a nice new medicine cabinet, and let's not forget the lovely new house numbers next to our front door.

There's nothing like hosting visitors to light a fire under our tucheses...

Lola's first trip to Home Depot

Not the Dove Girl

Following work yesterday Mark and I regrouped at the house. My job was to start on the guest room, while Mark took on the ceilings in the living room and hallway. Painting ceilings is hard! Even with the pole thingy, you have to look up constantly, and neck pain sets in pretty quick.

I painted three of the walls in the guest room. I am in love with the color. It's so calm -the room really feels like a retreat. I was enjoying the retreat yesterday until my jump method backfired on me. You see, I have this painting method that requires minimal ladder usage. I edge on a ladder, but once I have edged, I jump up and down to reach the spots that are too high. In case you are wondering, jumping leads to splattering, and splattering leads to eye washing. A nice glob of paint landed right smack dab in the middle of my eye ball. Mark was quick to check the paint can for the instructions which told us to flush my eye with water for fifteen minutes. That did the trick, but I was not happy... Needless to say, I have ceased use of the jump method.
Today, we had a lot of help today from Mark's friend Russ and David's friend Adam. I focused on the guest room today. I painted the accent wall and touched up the rest of the walls. I also pulled up the edges of the carpet to paint the moulding.

Mark and Russ sanded the door jams in the house so that we can paint them and not worry about the doors sticking to them or not fitting. Mark went out and got a Craftsman Mouse Sander to help with the job.

The bathroom is still in the works, but it is coming along nicely and will be finished on Monday. Here I am taking an imaginary shower. I tried to find the Dove commercial from 2007 that everyone told me looked just like me, but I can't track it down for a side by side. If anyone can track it down, let me know!

Alright. We're beyond pooped. Goodnight!

Edward Scissorhomes

This weekend was filled with fumes, namely tar. The bathroom was hot-mopped on Saturday at 7:30am. The process was quick, but the shower base was left filled with water to ensure a water tight seal. The workers came in with a bucket of steaming hot tar and literally mopped it all over the base of the shower and about one foot up the sides. They wore gas masks. We did not... We went the day without A/C so that we could properly vent with windows and doors open. We also used an industrial fan to waft the fumes outside.The rest of the fumes were from paint and primer. I finished the office walls and ceiling. Three of the walls were painted in Glidden's Classic Key Lime and the accent wall is Glidden's Soothing Green Tea. Mark thinks it looks too much like split pea soup, so we may re-evaluate the colors once the room is put together.
Following the completion of the office, Mark and I took on the living room. We decided to go lighter than we had originally planned, with Glidden's Eloquent Ivory. It's a really nice clean color that's off-whiteish, but with the light that hits the room, two of the walls look as though they're painted with a slightly darker color.

As far as paint brands go, we've bought all of our paints at Home Depot and are using both Behr and Glidden. I'm starting to prefer Glidden over Behr. Both are great, but Glidden is cheaper and I find that it spreads easier. This may be because it is thinner, but we are painting at least two coats in every room, so a little thinner is fine. If you are planning on only going with one coat, Behr may be your best bet.

We had our security system installed on Saturday as well, so don't be tryin' to break into our house or nothin'. I was surprised at how long it takes to install. The Brinks, sorry, Broadview, (they changed the name to "establish a separate identity from the armored transport division",) guy arrived at 8am and did not leave until around 2pm.

I also tried painting the closet cabinets this weekend, but even with the special primer for semi-gloss, the paint is not holding on very well. Mark purchased a paint removing solvent that we will try on them today to get rid of the 50 or so years of paint. Has anyone worked with this before? Any tips or suggestions?

After all of our hard work this weekend, Mark and I took our first bike ride around the neighborhood last night. I love where we live! It's such a nice, quiet pocket, filled with houses that probably looked identical back in the 60's but have slowly gained their own identities over the years. I told Mark that our neighborhood reminds me of the movie Edward Scissorhands. It's not all pastelly or filled with topiaries, but that's how I picture it looked back in the day.

Today's Progress...

It's been a long day... I got to the house at 8 this morning and immediately started painting the office. I got through two walls before I decided that I wasn't down with the broken window sill and decided to pry it off. Construction David helped me re-frame the window with drywall and then I gooped it up with patching compound.
David was tasked with reframing the base of the shower because we decided we wanted to "hot-mop" the shower base instead of going with a pvc liner to water-proof it. "Hot-mopping" is when you coat the base of the shower with tar. That will be completed tomorrow morning and David will commence with the tiling on Sunday.

The appliances arrived around noon. The fridge is up and running, but the water and ice aren't connected because we have to replace a leaky water valve. We're still enjoying the fridge in all her glory -blue protective shield and all... Mark joined us in the afternoon. He helped me take apart the closets and prep them for painting and then headed to the backyard for some treed erradication. He chopped "them weeds" up good!

A couple more photos from the day.

David saved us a pink tile from the shower that was.

I strike a pose mid-mudding.

Time Wasted and Time Enjoyed

I'll keep this short because I'm about to head to the house to work with Mark. As I mentioned yesterday, the paint in the bathroom is just not sticking -mainly on two walls. We're going to have to peel/scrape it off and re-prime with a special primer that is designed for semi and high gloss paint. Kind of sucks that I spent so much time on that this weekend. Lesson learned.

Yesterday after work, I met Mark at the house. We checked out Construction David's progress on the framing (looking good so far,) and we peeled some of the paint off the bathroom wall.

We also enjoyed a romantic dinner over our toilet. Classy, huh? It's amazing how much fun you can have enjoying a meal with someone you love over a toilet...

Linoleum Shmlenoleum

Whew! I never thought I'd be happy for the work week to start up again. It's a welcome break from this weekends tedious tasks. This weekend was spent tile shopping, priming, painting, and scraping linoleum from the floor of our guest bath. The A/C is not fully functional yet , so all of this was done in over 100 degree heat.

Some valuable lessons were learned.

1. One coat of basic primer is not enough to make semi-gloss stick to a wall that was already coated in semi-gloss. Not sure how we're going to handle this, as practically touching or skimming the wall takes the paint right off. Does anyone have any suggestions/experience with this?

2. If you're stripping linoleum, especially old linoleum that's basically melted itself into the floor, do it before you paint. The removal was an afterthought for me. Originally we were going to keep the ugly floor for the short term and tile it down the road, but it's absolutely icky and Construction Dave agreed to show me how to tile it myself later this week, so scraping commenced. Pieces of old nasty linoleum were flying everywhere and dinging the poor paint that just doesn't want to stick.


3. Touch up your paint when you're done with all of the work in the room. I touched up as soon as I removed the tape, after I painted the trim, and will need to touch up now that the linoleum is stripped. Could have saved myself a lot of time and early onset arthritis (working with a tiny brush and trying to be accurate is hard!) had I waited until all of the work was done.

4. Trim your nails before doing a project like this, linoleum is sharp, and wear gloves. As evidenced by the photo below, I did not do this. After I broke a couple of nails and got the booboo, I put on gloves. (I know my mom is shaking her head right now thinking that I should have known better and worn them from the start so my hands won't look gross. Sorry mom, you were right!)

There is still a little scraping left to do around the toilet.

Overall it was a productive weekend. I had some nice breaks that included Granny Gamenight at Debbie and Joe's. It was a blast! Joe, (who I will not refer to as "Testicle-head" eventhough that was the nickname he used in Scategories,) graciously offered to help on future house projects. Thanks Joe, (and there's your first shout-out)! Then last night I went from the house to my softball game. We won! Goooooo Four-Baggers!

Now I'm just plain pooped. This week will include more priming, painting and drywall repairing. Oodles of fun!