Monday, July 30, 2012

We're Home

After a long week of priming, painting, getting flooring, and moving all of our stuff, last night was the first night Jordan and I slept in our house. It was surreal. It was amazing. It was peaceful. But maybe that's because I was so exhausted! Jordan and my brother did all of the heavy lifting. I packed a lot of the smaller things and brought them to the cars and truck. I'm not sure how both of them lifted all that stuff out of our apartment and then, again, into our house. I'm amazed. Jordan also took apart and put back together 2 ikea beds. I accidentally dropped a piece on my foot. Jordan got a few cuts and bruises I am sure.

We still need to paint our dining room/ living room, hallway, and guest bathroom. Other than that we are waiting for our bathrooms and kitchen to be cleaned before putting anything away! Oh yeah, and putting up curtain rods and shower curtains. We definitely still have a lot to do so stick around to see how it goes!

Jordan just reminded me to tell the blog people how great of a job he is doing. He is doing an amazing job. He lifted most of the stuff in here. Out the furniture together. Sealed the kitchen tile grout. Made our washer/dryer connectors look pretty. I think there is lots more that I am forgetting.

Goodnight! (Can you tell I wrote this later at night using my phone?)

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Painting, Moving In, Flooring On

Well hello there. This week we are coming down the finish line to get into our house this weekend. Here are the details:

  • Our apartment lease ends on Monday, July 30th (total coincidence with the way this timing worked out).
  • We are working hard to get the rest of the surfaces painted so that the electrician can come back in to attach our bathroom fans/lights, room fans, light switches, etc.
  • We heard today that our carpet may be installed on Friday or Saturday, which would be awesome so we can put our bedroom together!
  • Not quite sure about the installation of our kitchen/service porch tile floor. To see the look we are going for click here. The writer, Lindsey, of a blog I follow, called Better After, just redid her bathroom floors and we really like the tile color and the layout.
  • If we don't have the tile floor in, grouted, and ready to go, we cannot put the fridge in, install a stove, put the dishwasher back in it's place (and pray that it works right, since it was the only thing the sellers left behind), and we cannot have the washer and dryer installed.
  • If the laminate flooring is not installed we cannot set up our dining table and chairs, our couch or coffee table. Not necessarily a big deal but we will finally be in our house... to live! Wouldn't you want to just put your stuff in it's permanent (until we get sick of it) place?
  • Window treatments. Need them. Everywhere.
  • Oh, don't forget the termite tenting. We will probably end up having to tent after we move in. Don't worry, I will post about this awful experience at a later date when the details are a little more hammered out. Just know that there may be some fraud involved and I may have cried about it.


Last Friday, Jordan and I headed down the 405 to Laguna and met my parents at the Pageant of the Masters (which is amazing, by the way). During our car ride we heard a radio commercial that said Sherwin Williams was having a sale for 40% paint! SOLD! Saturday morning we woke up, had some breakfast, rode over to our house to just glance at our walls to see how much work we had to, and then took the drive over to our local Sherwin Williams store... in North Hollywood. Let me just say that Sherwin Williams employee, Rich, is amazing. He was really patient with us while we told him we needed this and that. He didn't push any products on us. He was really helpful with suggestions when asked. When we didn't have set colors in mind he told us not to rush and buy the paint that day, borrow the fan deck and come back to make the order. Anyway, if you ever need paint, Rich is your guy! We also liked that he was able to talk to us about his own experiences painting. So, we stocked up on a giant 5 gallon bucket of primer, among with these guys:



We were able to prime most of our bedroom and all of the bathroom with 1 coat. The next morning we got up, got in and started our work again. Soon we were joined by Jordan's brother and one of my friends. Look at everyone doing work! Awe!!



Here are a few photos of what one of the built in shelving units next to the fireplace looked like before Jordan got his sander out and before I primed it!



Our plan for these bad boys is to paint the shelves white and the back, which is the wall, a pop of color. Here is an example from another blog, Young House Love:



Anyway, time for our paint color breakdown before it actually goes on the walls!

Living Room/Dining Room/Hallway:
Sherwin Williams Ethereal Mood
Master Bedroom, Bathroom, and Closet:
Sherwin Williams Adrift
Guest Bedroom, Bathroom:
TBD
Kitchen/Service Porch:
Sherwin Williams Hearts of Palm

Now Jordan picked the kitchen color himself and it's the color I'm the most nervous about. Originally, we wanted to paint the cabinets a rich a blue on the bottom and paint the top cabinets white. With the walls being a greenish color, I think that the bottom cabinets may end up being a charcoal color. That can be done next week. Also, eventually, I think I want to paint our front door yellow or something more fresh than the poop brown that it is right now.

Other projects I want to work on are taking a tall side table of mine, sand it, and "dip dye" the legs with a bright color. Today I got 2 free pints of paint from Benjamin Moore!


I also want to take the broken ass shutters that are currently on some of our windows and sand or paint them to hang on the wall somewhere. More on these another day. More work tonight! Thankfully, our friend Lindsey will be helping us out!

Stay tuned...

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Smooth It Out

Just finished a Breaking Bad episode... I figured now is a good time to give an update! We stopped over at our house after work and saw the work that was done today. The taper was there and started smoothing out our walls. Unfortunately, with poor light and no before photos it's really a hard thing to show before and after. I did get a few good photos but today will just be a quick snapshot. First photo shows the lovely layers of linoleum. Layer 1 and layer 2. Yikes. And on top of that was that awesome cement paver junk, remember that? For my second photo I have a picture of the (1)kitchen, smoothed out and without the window blinds!! (2) kitchen wall smoothing and patching. Yes, the yucky texture is almost gone! There is a spot that he couldn't get to. Photo from there another time. (3) our bedroom! They are starting to mud over the walls, hooray! (4) our fancy pants dryer vent. It is supposed to pop out when in use and then close when finished so no critters can crawl in! Stupendous, I hate critters.
That's really all I have tonight. I'm updating from my phone - sorry this is short! Goodnight.

Monday, July 16, 2012

Flooring Update and More

Oh Mondays... you always stink. We were hoping to get a lot of stuff done over the weekend but I got some sort of stomach bug that put me in bed almost all day on Saturday. While I was busy resting, Jordan got up bright and early and went to our house to oversee our kitchen floor removal. Spanish-style cement pavers are no more.



Some of our open walls were patched up with some drywall and they are waiting to be taped.. and mudded? I really need to learn more of the process.

New pipes.

Patching.


Our contractor is supposed to finish patching a few things tomorrow morning in order for the taper to get in there and start his business. We are also trying to decide if there is enough time and budget to put additional wall lights in the bathrooms. I am staring at the phone waiting for a return phone call as I type!!

So, in between catching up on Season 4 of Breaking Bad yesterday, we removed our butts from the couch and headed over to OSH to purchase 3 ceiling fans; 1 for our bedroom, 2nd bedroom, and the dining room/living room space. We still need to purchase ceiling light fixtures for the kitchen, our closet and possibly the bathrooms! Other items on our list include shower rods and curtains for both bathrooms, new hardware for our doors and cabinets, window curtain or some sort of covering, oh yeah, don't forget our appliances!

We also are trying to pick out our floors. What kind of carpet do we want? What kind of tile in the kitchen/laundry room do we want? What kind of laminate flooring do we want, if any? What color paint do we want for all our walls? Trim? Front door?!?! Kitchen cabinets?... Shoot, maybe even the 2nd bathroom cabinets.

Anyone have a good tutorial on how to prep walls for painting and also for cabinets?
There's a lot coming up in the next couple of weeks and I'll be sure to keep you posted in between going crazy!!! P.S. Did I forget to mention we also have to tent our house? We have to tent our house. The End.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

What's Behind Door #1?

Need a house fix fix? You are in luck! I have some updates for all of yous! (All of you 2 people that read this so far!) What a busy week we had! Jordan had a big birthday last week. We decided to have his party out in our new backyard. I think a few people were a little upset that we weren't letting them inside to peek around BUT it's for their safety. We all remember what happened to my foot! With the ladies wearing cute sandals on their feet it just wasn't ideal - PLUS it was a birthday party, not a house warming. The house warming party WILL happen! We promise. We've been dying to have one for 2 years.

So, what's been going on since the last post? Well, we had our pass-through cut out of our bedroom wall that will lead to our closet. Don't mind our friend Dave.



Oh look! Our new bedroom door is in! It's so seamless that I walked through it and didn't notice it until I turned back around. Wow!

From the hallway.


Closed from the hallway/


Closed from inside our room.


I believe up top it will just be dry-walled. For a split second I entertained the idea of a window or something but realized that with a clear window up there you can see the big, ugly vent. More updates on this as we go!

What else went on? Our plumber came over to put our washer/dryer connectors into the wall. I'm sorry I don't have the before pictures handy but dude, there were full on sticking out. Plus, Jordan was taking a look at the "plaster" on that section because it was flaking. As he was touching it, the wall fell off. Well, a small chunk, it was actually just cardboard laid on top of the wall with paint stuck over it. SERIOUSLY?! Here is what it is looking like now:

Washer/Dryer.



It's so pretty! He also removed our dishwasher so that the other guys could get back there for electrical and other stuff I'm sure they said but my brain didn't capture. I think he also may have fixed something under the sink.




And he worked a little magic on our water heater and cleaned up some pipage. New word for today.




I heard that dry walling may be happening sometime this week. Very exciting. Until next time..

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Blood

Here's the blood part of the blood, sweat, and tears that I promised. While dropping off a few party items like beer, tables, chairs and such, I moved my foot right into a screw. That'll teach me to wear flip flops in a work zone. Jordan says it's just a scratch. I say maybe it's almost a gash. It sure hurts like one. Anyway, here is a photo of our master bedroom progress and my poor foot. More updates to come!!

Monday, July 2, 2012

First Weekend of Work

We finally had our first weekend of work on the house. Our plan was to make sure everything was off the walls and to demo our bedroom wall. We think we were pretty productive and here is why:

Master Bedroom looking at the closet wall we are taking out:


Hallway looking toward our Master bedroom. We are taking out that wall, too. This will open up the room more.


Imagine this as a cube. This is my awful panoramic of the master bedroom by taking pictures as I kept turning around.


And here we go! Jordan opening up the wall.


Seeee?


I tried sawing through the wall so that I could break it into pieces that would be easier to throw away. My arms were so warm for the rest of the day. I quit after sawing up two holes. After that, I pretended it was 9th grade and I was back on the softball team. My abs got a really good work out.


We got a lot of the front side off and then began taking care of the interior of the closet.

Obviously, this is my hammering face..


And here are the afters!
Hallway, looking toward our bedroom.




In the closet, looking out to our hallway. We're really excited to have this not be a closet space!

In the closet looking out toward the other side of our room.


Want to see what else Jordan was up to? Cooking in the kitchen! His dad helped him get up the first tile. My dad helped with another. My brother smashed a bunch of tiles. Jordan got the whole row up, which neither of us actually took a picture of. That is how tired we were!

Before:

Sledge!




It kind of looks like Jordan didn't do any work from these photos but while he was doing all the work I was in the bedroom smashing up our walls, so I wasn't able to take those photos. SO fun! SO messy. We both had drywall, plaster, and tile dust all over us. Jordan also pulled up the dirty carpets, padding, and the staples. He also removed the tacking (is that what it's called?) from the doorways so people can walk through without tripping and getting tetanus.

Good picture, right?


To put a before and after next each to actually see the difference might help, right? Even if I have the incorrect angles...


Today, a contractor started work that we can't do ourselves. 1.) because we are inexperienced. 2) because we don't have the time if we want to be moved in within 4 weeks (well, earlier than that!). While nervous that I'm going to have to go sell my internal organs and get a second job just to pay for this, I am actually really excited to see the change. It will be so amazing! I'm looking forward to checking out what went down while we were at work today.

Stay tuned...

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