It's a Great Room

How about a little progress update? Here's Jordan standing in what might be a broom closet.

Remember that big ass beam I mentioned in the first remodel post? Yeah, well that was in place today when I walked in to the house. HOLY. BALLS. It is a big. Ass. Beam.

In progress:

Today:

Welcome to our kitchen! At the top left will be our fridge and a pantry. And along the wall with the window we'll have the microwave built in (sort of) and the stove and a ton of cabinets. The window will be gone because behind that wall will be bedroom #3.

Here's a look at our hallway from before reno and the current status.

Current:

So, in the newer and more improved, longer hallway into our Master Bedroom, our closet (omg, hooray, we'll finally have some sort of closet!) will be situated when you walk in to the right. Down the line, when we regain our sanity and build up our bank accounts, we'll have someone come out and design the space for an awesome built-in closet. For the time being we'll just shove our old IKEA dressers and stuff in there and call it a day. Boom. Once you're in the room we'll have the door to enter our Master Bathroom! For now, you can sort of see the space through the new framing.

I also think the materials used to build this house in the 40s are so interesting. It just looks like old bandages to me. From the outside we used to be able to see this weird wire strapped around the whole house and the sludge that held everything together was poking out of the holes. That's all been removed from the parts that were demoed.

Let's go outside. I was wearing sandals today but there wasn't as much debris so I was able to walk through the new framing of our laundry room and bathroom #2 to get some pics. Before we get to the current status here's a few pics of the progress:

Current:

That's all for now. I feel like demo is pretty much done and now the exciting rebuilding starts! And that's when our $ goes byebye. Floors, cabinets, tile, fixtures, dishwasher, slurpee machine. You know, all the important stuff.

Stay tuned!

STILL Half a Kitchen pt 1

I'm here to report that we've done nothing to the kitchen since the last time I posted. We both had a crazy busy few months; lots of work projects and lots of --what's it called?-- a wedding. Now that things have quieted down a bit, we can focus on our house!

We're looking into a refinance and a possible renovation, details coming soon.

Here's what we've been up to:
1. Furniture for our closet
We found these weird crazy bugs, which we think are carpet beetles, in our carpeted areas. We may have freaked out a little. We washed almost half of the clothes we own, since our closet situation was looking like this:

We vacuumed like crazy, sprayed some bug spray, vacuumed again and started putting together new IKEA furniture. This happened the weekend or two before our wedding. Jordan spent a lot of hours putting together 3 dressers and 1 wardrobe. Behold!

Don't judge us. I've been sick for over a week and we're in the middle of doing laundry and cleaning. Piles of clothes everywhere! Everywhere but the carpet. Anyway, the metal shelf-racks we have in the closet now just hold our shoes. All of our clothes (when clean and folded) get put into the new furniture. NO MORE BUGS! We had an exterminator come out and spray inside the house and outside. Even though we were only at our house a short time while the man sprayed outside, and then waited in the driveway for him to finish inside, I still got a massive migraine from the chemicals. He told us to leave the house for at least 4 hours. That shit was WAY strong more than 5 hours later. Those bugs better be dead. A couple days later we found 2 little guys. Jordan captured them in a baggie and they are now hanging on the fridge, just waiting for the exterminator to come back so he can positively ID them. Sounds gross, right? Not so bad. they are smaller than rice grains. I've also named them Fuzzy and Fuzz-Face. We realized today that they finally died, we think.

2. We tied the knot! After 7 months of planning and craziness, we had a really great weekend with family and friends. Jordan was a trooper but I was a mess, including falling down the stairs at my parent's house and skinning my arm 3 weeks before the wedding. (3 days after the wedding I burned my other arm with a curling iron... and today I'm getting over a bad sinus infection -- again). Anyway, everything was beautiful and beyond the stress of the planning we ended up with moments like this:

What was also special about our wedding day was that the city finally stopped by to plant our tree! I may have mentioned it briefly in this post. We took a couple of pictures when he was all leafy and happy. Today he only has a small patch of leaves...

Hopefully, we can keep the tree alive to take a picture next to it again next year. Another wedding gift for our yard is the lovely bird house we received! We're hoping for some birdies to make their home soon!

3. New Faucet! After the hot water handle stopped budging in our "master" bathroom, Jordan installed a new faucet! It's so much better!!

We have some other things going on but that can wait for part 2!
Stay tuned.

Just a Door Mat

We finally got door mats. It's been about 10 months or so but we finally got them. Hooray for Target.

Front entry:




Back entry:




Does it look more welcoming? Welcome, but not too welcome. Like, hey welcome, but you have to have a key to get in? No? Anyway... I also picked up a soap dispenser. Exciting for me. Jordan thinks I'm crazy.


I also found a set of pillow cases, place mats, a basket to hold place mats and other junk, and a decorative pillow for our room. Too bad it's only the size of my face and we have a king-sized bed. It looks stupid so it will be returned.



It's like doll-sized. Why?!

I don't have much else to give an update on. We had our trees trimmed the other weekend and the guys did some rearranging of our apple tree, cherry tree, and a fig tree that we think a squirrel must have planted. We have a plan to get rid of most of the rose bushes in our backyard. Unfortunately (well fortunately for us, because yuck), the bushes are so old that when we take them out they cannot be replanted. There are a few that are newer that can be moved to a different location. They just are little too "old" for us. We want something fresh. In the meantime say hello to one of our elderly roses:



I have a plan to get started on priming our kitchen cabinet doors tomorrow. This has been a long drawn out project. It's going to make the kitchen look great!! Jordan promised to take me out for dessert. I'm out of here!

What's Cookin' in the Kitchen?

With every free weekend that we now have you can find us working on our house. While Jordan was sanding one of our doors, I was playing in the kitchen. I took a roll of contact paper that I ordered over a year ago from Amazon (Metal FX Stainless Steel Contact Paper, 18" x 6'), and tried to make the kitchen a little bit more modern looking. I can't say I'm amazed with what I did but it works for now. We have a hand-me down basic white fridge that I wanted to give it a line of steel to match our stove and our microwave, which are both black and steel.

And after:

The backsplash tiles also needed a little modernization. This really was just my way of covering up the picture tiles... It's not that pretty now but at least those tiles are covered! I measured (poorly) and stuck the contact paper on.

And after.

We are going to see if we like this and figure out if we should add more steel tile squares, in a pattern. That might look cool! On another note, we finally got to washing our pots and pans yesterday. That means we were able to cook! Jordan cooked us an awesome meal tonight: artichoke, butternut squash raviolis, and a salad that I saw online and mentioned to him. It has avocado, corn, peas, and bell pepper. It was delicious!

Last week, I mentioned the electrician coming to install some of our light fixtures. Stupid me forgot to take before pictures. But here are some afters! I took 2 photos so you could see the brightness and then the actual fixture. We bought 2 of the round fixture for the kitchen and then realized how giant it was and decided to put the 2nd fixture in our closet, not photographed since it is still a mess!

And of course, an update on our bedroom lighting. We picked out the Cooper Lighting 310SN 6'' Recessed Fixture Trim and installed them into the ceiling. The white ceiling and blue walls definitely are interesting with the metal and black light trim. We really have a lot of light in here.

Tomorrow we may have doors for our bathroom and bedroom! We are having a handyman shave our doors so that they can actually open and close. He is also going to shave the front and back doors and install the thresholds for us. If we had the tools to cut the doors, we would do it ourselves. That's what Jordan was trying to do earlier by sanding the edge down. The sander just wasn't powerful enough. Luckily, it seems that the bedroom and bathroom doors only need a good wipedown. The frames, however, need caulking AND white paint. As do the rest of ALL of the doors in our house. And soon, SOON!, our front door will be yellow. No more poop brown. NO MORE!

Today, I also attempted to make our front porch not look so desolate. I put out a table, placed a potted succulent plant on it that was a house warming gift, and then I planted 2 tiny pots with flower seeds. Picture to come. Maybe I can document the flowers if they actually grow. The last time I tried to grow something was probably a 1989 chia pet. And those things are impossible to mess up.

That's all I have tonight. We're on a roll though, so stay tuned for more progress! There is a yellow front door, a closet barn door, and shatter-proofing/privacy-filming windows on the horizon. Ultra-fun stuff, I know... Good night!

My Current Viewpoint

Please gather 'round while I sit on the soft-carpeted floor of my bedroom and type this post. I'm sad to say that this post is a little bit of a filler while we try and balance exhausting 9-6 day jobs and life in general with getting things done in our house little by little.

Well, here I am (don't you judge the bags under my eyes!), sitting with my back against our bed, on the floor. That's because my laptop is currently plugged in here, under the temporary TV stand.

From this angle I have a lovely view of our bathroom, that still doesn't have a door, let alone a finished (by finished, I mean caulked and painted) door frame. Oh yeah, we also don't have a mirror in there yet. Oh yeah, and we (or maybe just me) are still trying to figure out a decent storage solution in here. More on that in another post.

To the left of that angle is our bedroom door... well it will be our bedroom door when we caulk and paint that door frame. Both doors also have to be painted.

To my right is our little Sony TV. This is going to be the TV we end up mounting on the wall in our bedroom. It's just sitting on the floor now, collecting dust until we figure where in the house to mount the bigger TV. We have an interesting living room space that is having us scratch our heads a little bit.

I guess the point of this post was to try to be current but to also try to light a fire under my ass to make a list. A real list.. on paper.. or um, on blog. Go room by room. Then start crossing them off as we go! I was thinking of making it another page, like the ones at the top of the blog, under the header. I think I'll title it "The List." Creative, I know.

Next time I update, I hope that my list will have been started. Lucky for us, the electrician should be coming by tomorrow evening to put up our remaining light fixtures and plugs, gfcis and what nots. If our house didn't have wiring from the 40s then perhaps we would attempt this ourselves. This time we'll leave it to the pros. I would love to show before and after photos of this but they will still be "in progress" since we're not done painting yet. I'm a little bummed. We bought a cool enough pendant light for our service porch, not realizing that the back door opens right into that space. So we are having to use the previous owners old nasty globe light for now. One thing at a time...

I will try doing an update on our fixtures tomorrow! Goodnight.

Sneak Peek: Master Bedroom In Progress

I thought I'd start a "sneak peek" series. Since we are slowly putting things away (okay, we haven't actually put ANYTHING away) the rooms are starting to come together. Starting with our bedroom, we have our bed all set up complete with TV and TV stand. A few things:

• 1. We have no door on our bedroom or the master bathroom yet. So that's interesting.
• 2. We have bald light bulbs just hangin' out. We took off the fixtures when we were painting and are thinking we want to get fresher looking new guys. We haven't yet looked up the prices to see what the cost will be.
• 3. The table that we used to eat on in our apartment is now the temporary TV stand in our room. The TV that used to be in our living room is now living in our bedroom hooked up to our DVD player.
• 4. Did I mention that we are trying to the whole we are not paying for television right now? We'll just watch shows on DVD and the internet. So far, not so bad. It's only been 3 days though. I honestly think we might be too busy to even care.
• 5. The old bedside tables (thank you, Ikea) haven't been put back together, yet.
• 6. A giant spider tried to eat my face off yesterday morning. While waking up, I opened my eyes and noticed a big black dot walking across the wall above our bed. I screamed. Jordan went and got a little box, captured the spider and put it outside. EW! It was bigger than a quarter! Now when I am in bed I curl up about a foot away from the wall and wake up every few hours to make sure there isn't a spider on me.

So, here is our progress:

*Sorry for the poor photo quality and weird filters. I was trying out the camera+ app and the HDR filter went a little crazy and made everything weird and green. Our bedroom is blue. Also, I am pretty sure I sized this right in Photoshop. Not sure why technology hates me today.

We are actually missing 3 doors. Our bedroom door, the bathroom door, and the closet door, which will actually be a sliding barn door when we get around to it! The windows have temporary vinyl blinds on them that we found at Target for $4.99 and $5.99. You peel off the backing and actually just stick it on the top of the window frame. For now it definitely serves our purpose for privacy while we decide on what to do with our windows. The only bummer is that until figure it out I can't paint the window trim... unless I buy new temp blinds. Seems like a waste of $$$.

Tonight we also bought a microwave. Target's selection wasn't big. And all we need it to do is heat up our food quickly. And we have gift cards there. So... now we have a microwave. It's cute and it kind of matches our stove. More on that in another post. Our bedroom is really all I have to show right now. The rest of the house is still crammed with unpacked boxes, big Hefty trash bags, and no true plan yet.

And because we are living off of DVDs right now, I'd say it's time for some Breaking Bad.

Goodnight!