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:
I’ve been missing in action lately on the blog because I’ve been slaving away on our blog book and I have great news – I finished our first book! It covers the time that Dallas and I met until a little after Brooke was born. Now Caroline is on me to do the next one because she wants to see pictures of herself so I may take another sabbatical.
Here are some more posts I made and backdated so they would be included in our book. Read if you want. Or don’t. I’ll never know.
Shall we take a stroll down memory lane? In my efforts to turn our blog into our family photo album, I’ve been adding posts about some of our early days. If you’re interested in reading about our life a decade ago, click these links!
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!
