Home Sweet Home? (Part III)

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…

We were now the proud homeowners of a condo.  Our next step was to fix it up.  We were excited to get to work!

We painted everything.  My siblings (and niece) were happy to help:

One of my favorite memories from this time was when my siblings and I all found ourselves in the same room painting.  We had already been painting for quite some time.  As we were working, we were cracking jokes and laughing so hard about everything.  We had never been so hilarious!

It was then I realized that we were quite possibly getting high off of paint fumes and that we probably needed to crack a window.  Once the fresh air started circulating we were suddenly a lot less funny.  Oh well.

Dallas and his stepdad, Bob, worked on installing laminate through the living area and hall.

We got new carpet in the bedrooms:

After a couple of weeks of hard work, our condo was finished:

After we won our condo, we quickly started packing up our apartment.  Dallas snapped a few pictures of the place.  It was tiny and gross and we were happy to be out of there and moving into a place we could truly call our own.