Thanksgiving is looming!

A lot has happened in two weeks!

The main thing is that at night the temperatures do dip below freezing, so the water hose that we have supplying water to the old house from the new house had been freezing at night. So we had several days without water in the morning in the old house. That has made us push as fast as we could to try to get move-in ready.

Here is a picture of the blue foam cobblestone that I mentioned we did in the upstairs to insulate the walkway upstairs. You can see in the background the insulation that now covers the main floor to helps us insulate the basement during the winter. Shawn erected at my request a sort of railing just to make sure people and kids don't plow into the itchy stuff. At some time in the future I'd like to staple plastic to it, just to keep the fibers at bay. This view is going down the "hallway" towards the stairs.

Two weeks ago, this is how the stair landing looked. We were storing all of the things that need to be stored in the safe room once we got the walls painted. Most of it is screens for windows, registers for the upstairs, and some caulk and paint.

 This next picture shows the new basement entry door, right after Shawn installed it, and after they drywall was hung. We're not going to finish and texture this drywall since it will be temporary and will come down in a couple of years when we do remove the door.

This picture shows the safe room after we finished painting it. And once that was done, I began to prime and paint the bathroom so that Shawn could get us a toilet installed. Eventually I'd like to add some shelving to organize storage of things, and maybe keep a mattress or something if we ever need to spend a couple of hours in here due to a storm or tornado. It will be nice to have a place to run to and not be afraid of being drowned since the old house storm cellar would fill up with water in a thunderstorm. I hope this is one of those things that we have available but we never have a need to actually use.

And here you can see Evan demonstrating our new toilet. It's one of those watersense toilets that are supposed to be super savers for water. It features a dual flush, where you push the lever down and it will flush liquids with minimal water, and you can hold it down a little longer to flush solids, if needed. Though so far I've found that the smaller flush is enough for everything, so that will be a nice way to conserve water, especially now that we will no longer be on a well, and we'll be paying for water to the rural company. I think the average flush is 1.4 gallons for this toilet vs. about 5 or 6 gallons of the old toilet in the old house.

The bulk of the past two weeks was taken up by painting. We first needed to prime all of the walls before we could put a coat of paint on it. Priming seemed to be a very slow process, especially for one person at a time, since the new drywall would just suck in the primer and it took a lot to get one wall coated. But God blessed is with awesome family and friends that have helped us a lot all along our project, and we had a lot of help to paint as well.

Tuesday a week ago, two of the ladies from our small group brought us dinner and their paint rollers and helped me prime three rooms that night. By then everything was primed with the exception of the wall with the windows and sliding door in the kitchen/lounge.

Wednesday and Thursday I had a job related trip, so Shawn wasn't able to do much taking care of the kids while I was gone. My In-laws came for the weekend and actually took a day of vacation at work to help us tackle the painting. While I finished priming what was left, Shawn, Derald and Pam worked on applying a coat of paint. We were all so busy, I didn't really take that many pictures. But here you can see Shawn early on Friday morning as he painted a bedroom. We're going with white for now and we'll maybe paint something different in the future when we do have a ceiling installed.

Here you can see Pam modeling the main painting equipment.

We actually finished painting the whole house in one day, with the exception of the inside of the display alcoves on either side of the fireplace, and around the slider door, and Evan's room, which will get a design and colors besides white.

Then Friday pm, my cousin Julie came over with her daughter Sarah to help us out as well for the weekend. (She's technically my first cousin once removed in-law which is saying that my dad and her husband are first cousins.) I took advantage of her offer to help so while we painted, she cleared out cabinets in the old house so we could begin moving them out. She also cooked, cleaned, did laundry and helped Sarah watch the children. On Saturday we cleaned out the new house picking up all of the paper that covered the floor, vacuming up all of the drywall dust, scraping by hand chunks of drywall mud stuck to the floor, and sweeping and moping. My in-law's had ticket for the Cyclones game in-town, which is one reason for the visit, and the reason they graciously took a day off work to help us out. So while they were gone, I began to paint Evan's room and Shawn began to install us a bathroom sink.

As I mentioned before, the budget will not allow us to put in new cabinets for the kitchen and bath so we're reusing kitchen cabinets from the old house. But the bath cabinet was made with that particle board, and it got wet, and it was in pretty bad shape, despite only being 5 yrs old. So it ended up in the burn pile and Shawn built me a stand from of 2x4's that we stained. Derald was put in charge of applying two coats of polyurethane sealer during the weekend so that we could move it into the house.

We did end up re-using the bath sink countertop and faucet, since those are looking almost brand new after good scrub down with calcium and lime remover. Here is a picture of the final product. Just a few cosmetic things to fix up, but that looks like an expensive rustic design sink.
And as you can see here, the electrician started this week installing our light fixtures.











Here is a picture of Julie as she worked on clearing our kitchen cabinets out and stored everything in boxes, since I'd like to sort through everything before we actually move it into the new house. I might try the method of trying to recall what's in the boxes after living without those things for a month, and if I can't remember what it is, maybe I don't need it and it can go to goodwill so as to not fill our new home with clutter. We'll see.

Here you can see the motley crew as we enjoyed dinner after a hard day of work on Saturday.
On Sunday, we took out the kitchen cabinets and moved them outside so I can touch them up with a coat of paint. We took the sink out and we were going to take the base cabinet out, but it was pretty nasty for one thing, plus the way the plumbing was done to go through the bottom of the cabinet made it not worth the hassle of trying to save it.

We will get some new countertops since the old one for the kitchen sink was in such a bad shape it ended up in the burn pile as well. My FIL bought a set of plans to make kitchen cabinets, and he's proposed that if we put the lumber, he'll build us kitchen cabinets sometime in the future. So Shawn got some more lumber last night and we'll try a 2x4 stand for the sink base cabinet since that worked out so great for the bath, and reuse the smaller base cabinets and some top cabinets for the rest.

The electrician has been at it for two days now, and if he finishes today, we can start working on putting in a kitchen. So maybe by Sunday we will be sleeping in the new house? I hope so! We have tomorrow off because of Veteran's day, and we'll be taking vacation on Friday, so with a 4 day weekend, we hope to accomplish a lot! Pray for us so that all goes well.

So here are some miscellaneous pictures of our lights.

Eyeball can lights for witewashing a wall with light in the lounge. Some sort of artwork will be displayed here and highlighted by these lights.

 Here's an example of the light fixtures we chose for the basement. We went with a very basic, economically priced fixture and we'll upgrade in the future after we get a ceiling and define the style of each room.

 Another view of the fixtures now mounted in the hallway.

This picture here showcases our family room with the can lights that are powered through a dimmer. That looks like a stage production. Maybe I should write a play about a boy, a countertop, a ladder and a broom, or a boom if the boy fell off the ladder (which he didn't, I assure you). :)

Our bathroom consists of two rooms separated by a door, so that if a person is using the toilet or the bathtub, another person can still have access to the sinks. Each room will get a slightly different theme. This picture is of the bath lights in the room where the sinks are.You can see the lights have that bronze style, though they look brown in the pictures. The hole you see is where the ceiling register will go for A/C.

 

The tub/toilet room has satin nickel in the tub hardware, so we chose a bath/fan that had a satin nickel base, and decided to use satin nickel plates on the outlets and switches.

That's it for now. I really hope we can be at least sleeping in the new house soon, even if it's not completed, so that we don't have to deal with frozen garden hose and no water, and we can shut the water off to the old house for good. But there's a lot that needs to get done, and with one of us watching kids, it's hard to advance a lot. The washer needs a thorough de-scaling and lime removal since our water well was so hard, and the fridge will need a good cleaning before I will allow it to get moved.

So it's exciting times for us, and Thanksgiving is just around the corner, which has sort of been my self-imposed deadline to be moved in. Me might just make it!

Until next time!