Home Sweet Home

I never got around to posting last week, so this week shows two weeks’ progress.  Let’s see what we have.

Oh yes.  I left off describing the millions of paint drips we had after our attempt to use the paint gun:

We spent days sanding down the drips leaving the walls a mess once again.

Since we realized we’d basically be repainting everything all over again anyway, we decided to engage in another round of spackling to get some holes that we missed the first time around:

Now the painting is finally pretty much done and things are starting to look good.  How nice to be able to say that!

My brother Jacob and his family were in town and Jacob actually volunteered to come help us at the house during his vacation.  What a guy!  He helped us grout our tile:

After finishing that he asked what else needed to be done.  Painting was the only thing that came to mind.  Our front room has really high ceilings and we needed someone to touch up the overspray.  Jacob agreed to tackle the task and am I ever grateful he did.  Mostly because I didn’t want to do that job but also because he gave us my favorite quote of the day.  He finished the first coat and was glad to be done with that chore.  However, his joy was short lived when he learned his next job was…painting a second coat!  With a slight roll of his eyes he climbed the ladder once again and began the tedious work.  As he was painting he remarked, “You know, it’s actually a lot easier painting a second coat.  And it’s not like the nature of the task has changed.”  (For those of you who didn’t grow up in our house, allow me to introduce you to one of my dad’s favorite quotes, “That which we persist in doing becomes easier to do, not that the nature of the task has changed but that our ability to do so has increased.”)

My dad tiled the backsplash area in the kitchen:

The kitchen is coming together nicely!

Dallas and my grandpa worked on hanging a chandelier in the entryway:

Dallas’s dad came by and put on a new toilet seat:

He also helped us begin to tackle the backyard.  We had a lovely weed patch:

Dallas’s dad brought his mower and cleared out the tops of the weeds.  Just doing that made the yard look so much better:

After some debate we decided to add new linoleum in the bathrooms.  We found we could save money by removing the baseboards ourselves, so we did.  The linoleum peeled right up:

The master bathroom shower had a leak which we fixed when we first got the house.  However, as we ripped up the linoleum we saw the board under it was soggy and moldy.  Nice.  We ripped up the board that the linoleum was on to get rid of the mold.

My dad laid some linoleum in the laundry area, and he and Dallas spent time rolling out all the air bubbles:

There was tile in the basement that had never been grouted so we used our leftover grout to complete that job.  The grout made that tile look so much better:

Dallas painted our door and shutters.  We decided to ditch the blue and use red paint.  Dallas was convinced it would look good.  I was nervous.  Now that it’s painted, I am glad we went with red.

Dallas’s mom thought our house could improve upon its curb appeal so she brought us over two flower pots.  Those flower pots have made all the difference!  I love seeing them on our front porch next to our fresh, red door.

A few weeks ago when we were neck deep in renovations I told Dallas that someday we would enjoy going to our new house.  I think that day is finally approaching.  We really just need to clean everything and get the carpet installed and we’ll be about ready to move in.  Hooray!

Time for another house update!  This is a fun one because we actually improved the house this week instead of just destroying it, and we have before and after pictures.

First a story.  My brother, Jacob, bought a house years ago.  At some point he surprised me by saying he was painting the garage.  This was unexpected because 1) he doesn’t seem to have much patience for painting and 2) it was a garage so who cares if it’s painted?  I asked him why he was expending so much energy on his garage, and he said he just likes how a painted garage looks.

Since then I’ve noticed people’s garages, and by golly, he’s converted me into loving the beauty of a crisp, white garage.  Since we have so much work to do on this house, I wasn’t planning on painting our garage anytime soon.  However, we got our hands on a paint spray gun which would allow us to get all our painting done in a fraction of the time it would have taken to do everything by hand.  We decided it would be a great time to paint the garage while we were at it and Dallas could use the garage to practice his spray paint technique before we let him loose in the house.

Here I am sanding the garage:

Here’s what the garage looked like before painting:

Here are the guys getting ready to paint:

And the garage after:

It’s white!  It’s beautiful!

Dallas and I had decided to paint our ceilings white and the walls a beige color.  Apparently people don’t paint their ceilings a different color from the walls especially when using a paint gun because after you paint the ceiling one color, you have to go back and paint the walls the second color but the overspray gets all over the ceiling causing a whole lot of touch-up work needing to be done.  Dallas really loved the idea of white ceilings so we decided we were up for the challenge of trying to keep the two colors separate.

Here’s the kitchen all taped up with the ceiling painted:

And the bathroom:

You can see the areas where the overspray hit the walls.  My dad was determined to devise a contraption to help shield the ceiling from the overspray when we painted the walls so we would have less touching up to do.  Here is his idea:

Brilliant idea and it worked great…for about 30 seconds until it got so much paint caked on it that it was leaving a mess everywhere.  Thus they had to ditch the ceiling saver.

The garage was deceptively easy to paint and Dallas did it flawlessly leaving him confident in his spraying abilities.  Unfortunately, the rooms were more challenging.  He was trying to avoid spraying the ceilings and didn’t have as much space in the rooms to work causing too much paint to spray on the walls causing drips.  Lots and lots and LOTS of drips.

Behold (click to enlarge if needed):

Imagine a collar of drips all along practically every wall on the inside of the house.  That’s what we have.  Imagine trying to get these drips off.  It’s ridiculously hard.  Our tip for other amateur painters – if you’re using a spray gun and you see drips, immediately roller them to blend into the wall instead of leaving them to dry.  As it stands now, we’re wondering if using the paint gun did in fact save us any time.  Grrr.

Remember this wall?

 

After sanding it looked like this:

And here it is painted:

It’s beautiful!  You can’t even tell all the million places we had to spackle and sand.  It’s so smooth and nice (as long as you don’t lift your eyes to the ceiling and see the ring of drips circling overhead…).

Check this out.  Here is a wall over by the bedrooms that had been a little beat up:

After painting:

Doesn’t it look nice?

Here’s a cute little helper:

Enough about painting.  Let’s talk about flooring now. We decided to go with tile floors.  We had planned to have the tile professionally installed.  Then my dad said he could do it.  I didn’t know my dad had experience tiling, but he has done a lot of work building houses from his younger years.  Turns out everything he knows about tiling kitchen floors he learned from watching YouTube videos.

Gulp.  Nothing to worry about, right?

Luckily we were able to recruit my sister’s husband, Jeff.  Here he is laying backerboard like a pro:

Dallas sealing the seams:

Then the tile laying began:

They acted like they knew what they were doing and things actually ended up looking pretty good!  (By “things” I mean my floor looked pretty good.  My dad, however, did not.)

The guys assured me that if I noticed any lines that were slightly off, it wasn’t their fault; they claim the tiles weren’t all exactly the same size.  A likely story.

It was a glorious moment when the last kitchen tile was cut and laid.  Novices or not, I think they did great with the tile.  I’m excited to see it grouted.

We’re all beginning to seriously doubt we’ll be able to move in this weekend.  Sorry Jacob and Laurie!  I think we’re going to be crashing your vacation.  Mom and Dad are already bracing themselves for the invasion of seven grandkids staying in their house.  I have a sinking suspicion our kids will be doing very little sleeping…