April Post

Spring is here, and the weather is making us think that it's time to start to get serious about siding. Last week we got the bill from the electrician (yes, we did pass inspection even with our weird project) and it came about $600 more than hoped. We had added a few extras and some of the work done upstairs was part of the upstairs bid, and not the basement. We knew it would be higher, but we had really hoped for less than that. So, there went the little we had saved up so far to start this year's projects. *sigh*

But, we do have the dumpster rented and we're supposed to be cleaning the old house. Right? I guess we're really used not doing anything or somehow we seem unable to come up with the time to get to it. Not to mention that with the kids it's about impossible to do anything. With Evan wanting to play with everything and keeping Bianca from eating whatever is on the floor, not much progress gets made if we bring them in. And I don't allow Shawn to throw anything unless I've had a chance to look at it, that by himself he doesn't progress much just because he waits for me to take a look.
Still, we got things sort of sorted into piles, but the dumpster is miserably empty. I have to keep reminding myself that we've actually burned a ton of things. But still. I am really really really really hoping that it's because I want to sell things at the garage sale. I'm watching that show about hoarders and I definitely don't want to go down that road.

Despite all of this, there has been progress. In between waiting for the electrical inspection and the carpet to show up, Shawn worked on our data/cable outlets. We were blessed with an extra Christmas gift from my parents to complete the purchase of a new flat screen TV. So, to go with our new tv, we splurged and got ourselves some dish network. Now you really know why progress has been slow. I call it training. We do watch a lot of DIY Network. Anyway, we needed to have our coax cables hooked up.

And here you can see Evan being a great helper while Shawn installs the data outlet in the guest/laundry/spare bedroom.

Shawn bought all of the supplies and tools needed, and installed the coax and cat5 and phone outlets for each room. Right now we have the satellite feed coming into the closet under the stairs, where it connects to the family room line, our bedroom and the guest/spare bedroom lines.

This picture is a close up of our new outlets.This one is in the family room right behind the TV. The one on the left is where the cables for the surround speakers come in on the wall behind the tv. And the outlet to the right shows how our new data/video plates look. We have phone, data, and cable on this one. Eventually when we are able to switch internet providers once our cell internet plan expires, we will have the capability of surfing the net from our tv and stream movies from netflix. But that will have to wait until next year, since our Verizon contract won't expire until then.

The other exciting thing that happened is that our family room carpet is finally in! And no, we didn't go with green carpet. This is the guys working on installing the rubber pad. And remember how we had to cancel the carpet install because the order had been messed up and only 2 rolls had come in? Well, they get the pad down and it turns out we only needed 2 rolls. Figures. At least we can use the leftover pad somewhere else. We also ended up with enough pieces of leftover carpet to do perhaps Bianca's room. Might need to tape a few seams, but I'm sure we can handle it. We have installed carpet before (once) and it actually wasn't too bad, it's just a bit labor intensive. But a small room like Bianca's might be worth the rental fee for the tools, since we already have the pad and carpet for it.

I thought I had a picture of the final carpet install, so that will have to wait to next month. (Yes, I am trying to do at least one post per month.)  This is what I have for now. At least you can see the nice dark chocolate color that we picked for our carpet.

We all love the change from hard floor to this nice soft surface, and we do spend a lot of time playing on it. One rule we now have is to avoid eating in the living room and no drinks. So far we're doing good on that.

I was trying to think what else we have worked on since last month. We've done a few miscellaneous things here and there, like caulk the joint between the floor and the toilet. Right now the current project is to install a frosting membrane to the bathroom window. It will be a while before we get some sort of window treatment, so this at least will help with privacy. Even though the neighbor facing that window is across the river, over the hill and half a mile away, I still feel very exposed.

One thing that we should have done when the windows came two and so years ago, is that we should have taken the stickers off the windows. By the time we thought about it, they were already so stuck on there, it's not even funny. By then we didn't have the time to be messing with this since there were other priorities. Now it takes about a thirty minute scraping and soaking with acetone to get those things off. So we'll be working on those suckers on and off as we get a chance. Another thing we should have done, was to double check the screen sizes. Those were delivered about a year after windows were installed, and we've been storing them since. Finally, today we brought them out since it was nice enough outside that we wanted to open the windows. Uh Oh. The screens for the bar/kitchennete window are the wrong size. Shoot. Now we have to go back to the dealer, and we're not looking forward to that. It took this rep 8 months of e-mails and phone calls to get him to get us the two missing handles that never came with the windows. Maybe by fall we'll have the right screens, if things are the same.
We got the rest of the screen for the basement in, and sometime we'll have to double check the ones for upstairs.
I really don't want to install those yet because they will get wrecked since work is still needed up there. But we better check them now, since at our rate, it will be five years before we're able to get to use them upstairs.

With the budget so very low, we're starting to think about what we will be tackling next. The old house still needs clearing, and I really need to prepare for a garage sale. The garage slab will probably have to wait until fall, when we hope to have the cash saved up for it. At least for siding we have all of the materials bought, except for things like paint, and caulk, which we should be able to fit in the little money we have left right now. So probably by next month there will be some sort of siding progress made. We'll also try to get to the soffit , but that's a little more expensive than paint.

We'll see what we can do. Maybe the garage sale will be a huge success and we can fund some more house projects with that.

Until next time...

Phase III - It begins

Well, we've officially kicked off Phase III. And we are christening this season of work with some carpet.
We saved up enough to put carpet in the family room since Lowe's has that good deal of labor for $100.
We need a special pad to go under our carpet, so that the insulation value of pad + carpet is low enough to allow our radiant heat floor to heat the space as designed. Three weeks ago we ordered the carpet and pad, and it arrived at Lowe's a week ago. They called, set up the install for this past Monday, so we spent a whole afternoon moving all of the furniture out of the space and cleaning.

As usual, we got the phone call that somehow someone messed up the order and though we had ordered 3 rolls of carpet pad, only two rolls showed up. It will be another week before the pad comes in, so we're hoping that on Monday we will get the call that the carpet pad came in, and we shall have carpet installation scheduled soon!

We are also still waiting for the electrician to schedule the electrical inspection. He must not need the thousands of dollars that we owe him since he doesn't seem in a hurry to get that inspection done so he can send us the bill. We keep making a whopping 1% on it, so doesn't bother us to keep the money a while longer.

The other thing that I can finally get some pictures is for my laundry area.

Here you can see our washer and dryer up on the pedestal. My father in law has volunteered the labor to build us a counter above the washer and dryer and some small cabinets on the side, and maybe some shelves/cabinets on the wall to store laundry items.
We're saving up the money to purchase the lumber, so maybe this spring he could get started on those? That would be nice.

And here are the pictures of those two interior doors that we purchased earlier this winter.

This one is the one we purchased for the bathroom that had the wrong swing. So you can see it here now as Bianca's bedroom door (which will someday be the office). We still have to stain and seal them, but I like the natural color so much, that I'd like to just put a clear coat on and leave it as is.

And this is the other door that had the correct swing for the bathroom.
Speaking of the bathroom, here is how our sink area looks for now:

The mirror is recycled from the old house, and where you see the little table on the right is where we will someday install a second sink. We had a mind of just building another fancy stand out of 2x4 like the one we currently have, and purchasing a sink top to match. This works for now.

One other thing that he have done in the month since the last post is that we built some plywood doors to close the area under the kitchen sink. We had Shawn's dad, Derald, route a rounded edge on them during one of his visits, and here you can see Shawn painting them to match the rest of the cabinets.

All in all, they turned out good, and it's nice to be able to lock away chemicals from inquisitive 1 yr old Bianca.

That is pretty much it for now.

Now that it is beginning to thaw, we will probably start focusing on the exterior. The goals for this year are:
-Finish the siding at the back peak, the chimney, and the front of the house
-Pour the garage slab,side walk and parking area in front of garage
-Get some garage doors
-Deal with the egress window wells and landscaping a little
-Stain the windows, get more interior doors, and install trim in the basement
-Get junk out of old house, have a huge garage sale and demolish the old house

It's a tall order, and we'll go as far as we can. We've begun cleaning out the old house, and we got a medium sized dumpster to clear house. Last weekend Shawn's parents came down to give us a hand going through the piles of things we have in the old house. By the end of the day, only a couple trash bags had made their way into the dumpster. This whole idea that oodles and oodles of things would end up in the trash pile somehow didn't work. Hopefully it is because things are garage sale worthy and not because I'm hoarding all of that!

I will try to post again in early April, and hopefully by then the old house will be cleared of the usable things, and the piles of things we'll be ready for garage sale season. We have a mind of also going through the barn and taking advantage of the dumpster as well. Until next time!

So much for posting

Two Sundays have come and gone, and I am still unable to post!
I guess since a weekly post seems about impossible right now, I am going to shoot for a monthly post.
So hopefully mid-february I'll have something worthwhile to write about.

Right now not much has been done in the new house for a couple of weeks, and the little that has been done, I will save for that February post. Maybe if I start writing now, I'll have something to post in two weeks.
One thing that we think we desperately need is some carpet in the family room, so that Bianca who now has started to walk has a safe place to play and fall without hurting her head. So maybe the new funds for this year will be christened with a carpet job.

Until next time...

Phase II is Officially Done

Phase II was what we needed to do to get moved into the basement. As the way construction goes, things didn't turn out originally as planned, but the major goal was achieved. Out of our Phase II projects, three major taks we did not accomplish, which will now be moved to Phase III: 1) Finish the siding and outside flatwork (including the garage slab and doors). 2) trim and interior doors for the basement including staining the windows, and 3) flooring. In addition to these, there are smaller interior finishes needed for the basement like closets (who knew closets were so ridiculous in price!), cabinets for the bathroom and laundry, and misc. here and there things. The kitchen turned out all right, so we'll save the expense of new cabinets here. The bathroom sink turned out so well out of 2x4 that we're now considering building another $8 stand and getting a used sink top out of the Re-Store to complete the pair. Figure something for toiletries and towels, and we should be good there.
We used the last dollar of our Phase II budget to buy a door for the bathroom. So we now posses two doors in our house, and I still need to take pictures.

The only picture I have on-hand today is of the paint job in Evan's room. It is still not finished, but Evan picked the colors, and loves the look of it, so I'm pleased. He even helped to put his own mark in his room, but that will have to wait until I get a chance to get more pictures.

The whole wall on the left is green, and the whole wall on the right is blue, and the opposite wall to this one is a combo of the two colors all over each other that Evan painted himself. Eventually Evan is to put brown handprints in those stripes, and there's still some more brown accenting that needs to be added. Evan love's trains and my intent was to suggest something train like, though the comments I've gotten is to question if he's into Transformers. Go figure.

Next Step is to plan Phase III:
The main challenge, of course, will be the budget and to creatively fit the projects within that budget.
The main focus of this Phase is going to be the exterior of the house and the garage. We need to finish siding the front of the house and garage, and the whole house needs a second coat of paint. We dearly need a concrete floor in the garage and a driveway poured in front of it, and some steps. And it will be nice to have some garage doors and to store vehicles there rather than tools! And we'll see what we can do about landscaping. We will also need to finish our window wells and figure something with those.

Also staining the windows is a priority this year as well. If we can swing it, I'd like to get flooring by next winter for sure. So for the next two or three months, we won't be doing anything that will require capital over $100 to accomplish, since we're manipulating our cash flow so that by summer we will have the capital to tackle the big projects.

In the meantime, we will start (someday) the unpleasant task of sorting the junk out of the old house. We will be renting a dumpster so that we don't just move junk around. If it's not garage sale worthy, it's binnable! I'm a hoarder, so this will be tough on me, but I want to be smart about what I keep, then make a profit of what I can't or won't, and not be sentimental about what I toss or burn. But that's easier said than done!

I will also resume posting once a week on Sunday's. For now the posts won't be big or full of things, since it's mainly miscellaneous tasks here and there that we're going to be doing. I'll try to catch up with pictures and we'll see how it goes.

A house is built with walls and beams, but a home is built with hope and dreams

Hope Christmas was Merry for all and may your New Year be blessed!

The pace of construction has really slowed down now. It's a wonder we ever had time to do what we did this past year. Maybe after the holidays things will pick up again, though the lack of funds does limit much of what we can do.

As the New Year approaches, it's a wonder to look back of all that has happened this year with our house.
Sometimes, there are moments where both Shawn and I are struck by that fact that we have been in charge of building this dream. It always brings to mind a decorative picture that we got from Shawn's parents (that I keep forgetting to mount). It says that a house is built with walls and beams, but a home is built with hope and dreams! We sure have huge dreams for our house, but even with it half finished, it has quickly become our home. And the hope that Shawn and I have within us is fills us with joy. We have been blessed beyond belief this past year, and our faith in Christ is what has held us together. Anyone who has ever done building or remodeling in any shape or form knows how this can be challenging. But through it all, what has sustained us is the knowledge that ultimately we own nothing, and we are merely stewards of what God gives to us. Though more often than not we probably mismanage rathen than manage what we have. We are greatful for the great support and help from family and friends. Truly, our home would not be as is without the help from those we love and cherish. So thank you to everyone who has in anyway, shape or form contributed in helping us along our journey.

Enough sappy stuff. Here are some more pictures about what we've been up to in the month since we moved in. After we had a workable kitchen, the next step was to get the laundry area ready. During our stint in the basement, we will have the laundry in what should have been the closet of the guest bedroom. Though as I ponder the future and a new laundry room upstairs, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps this will not be a temporary laundry area, but rather than haul the kids clothes upstairs whenever we do get a laundry room, we can just keep this one and do laundry here as well. By then the kids aught to be teenagers, so they can do their own laundry as well.

Our washer is a front loading machine, and in a previous home, Shawn's dad had build us a stand to elevate them off the floor for easier reach. And since the pedestals that do go with our laundry are ridiculous in price, we opted to buy lumber and build our own custom stand.

So here is Shawn building my laundry stand.

And here is the final product. Added to the to-do list of someday is the staining job. I really like the way the plain wood looks, so I think just a clear coat will suffice. I thought I had taken a picture of the washer and dryer on the stand, but must not. Also in the to-do list is a counter and maybe some sort of cabinets for storage above the laundry. So maybe this next year, we'll get to do that.

Here is the promised picture of our Christmas tree. In previous posts I may have called it Australian pine, but it's an Austrian pine (I think). All in all, it turned out a suitable candidate for such an honor. 

 

The next picture show's our massive fireplace. Right now it is unfinished and covered with cement board since it will someday be covered with stone veneer. A real wood burning fireplace will be housed in the middle. Santa didn't seem to mind the lack of fireplace and chimney and still made it to our home. The open storage area that you can see on the left will be for storing wood logs. On the right side, behind the wall is where all of the pipes buried in the concrete for our radiant heat make an exit, and a removable panel reveals access to the space below so we can work on the radiant heat manifold as needed.

 

On both sides of the fireplace we have some alcoves that we incorporated so as to not waste any space. Below this alcove pictured here is where the manifold is hidden. On the other side, above the wood storage area, there's a similar alcove to display who knows what. For now, this one is housing our small nativity scene. Someday we'll have a more size appropriate display item in there. Add that to the to-do list.

 

So that's it for now. We did go to Bernard's, as Evan calls it, to purchase a wood door for out bathroom. But we made a mistake in deciding the swing of the door, and it so happens that the only interior door in the basement that uses a left swing is in Bianca's room. So maybe this New Year's weekend Bianca will get a new door installed, and we'll keep going with the curtain we've been using in the bathroom for a wee bit longer. Menard's is still having a sale on doors, and Shawn might purchase another door with his Christmas present. So we'll see.

Until next time and Happy New Year!

We're In!

During Veteran's day weekend, we accomplished our goal of moving into the new house! With a working tub, toilet and sink, we felt that we could manage it. The house still needed to be properly swept and cleaned, not to mention that we lack interior doors, flooring and trim, but we moved our bed, Evan's mattress and Bianca's pack and play, and we slept in what will someday be the guest bedroom. But we did it!

With the long 4 day weekend, we managed to accomplish a lot, most of which I forget by now, but I'll do my best.

We started off with the trying to get a workable Kitchen. Shawn built a base cabinet for the corner and sink out of some 2 x 4's that you can see in the picture. Here, it is in the process of being painted white so that it will match our kitchen cabinets.

While he did that, I took some spray paint and refreshed our metal vintage cabinets from the old house. You can see one of the base cabinets in the back. Also, I took some rust calcium and lime cleaner and gave a good scrubbing to our nice old Kohler cast iron sink that we took out of the old house . We went to Lowe's to buy new sink drains, but after noticing the cheap metal things they use nowadays (and solid brass ones were ridiculously expensive!), we decided to save the planet and recycle our old ones. They are actually very good quality, Kohler solid brass drains, and a little bit of some elbow grease into cleaning them and new gaskets for them and we were good.

Once I finally had the sink without a trace of lime on it, it was time to start assembling our Kitchen. These next pictures show our initial blank slate. The stove you see is a modest electric stove that we purchased at the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, which is the goodwill of home improvement centers. The oven looked like it had never been used, and aside from a couple of knobs that look like someone had a fire in a pan and melted them, it does the job well.
The sink will be right in front of the window, so that we may enjoy our beautiful view while doing dishes.

This next picture is a view of the other kitchen wall where most of the upper cabinets and the fridge will go.

This next picture is the beginning of our new kitchen. The new wood base looks nice in the corner. The space you see in between the wood base and the small metal cabinet will house the dishwasher. You can see that the small cabinet extends in front of the fixed panel of the sliding door. The original bar idea calls for a peninsula that will host the "bar" and that will not be in front of the door, though the counter may extend into it. But for now, we'll have to put up with this choice so that we can have a bit more counter space. A future project will be to make something out of wood to disguise the back of this small metal cabinet so that from outside the glass, the view is not so... ugly. At the end of the day, we took measurements and headed to Lowe's to purchase some new countertops and the rest of the plumbing supplies.

The next step was to cut the countertops to size. It took a couple of cuts to find the tool that would make a clean cut without chipping the laminate, and we got all of the pieces cut. We mounted the countertop onto the base cabinets, then Shawn cut out the hole for the sink while I worked on mopping and cleaning out our bedroom so we could move our bed to it.

Here you can get a glimpse at the color of counter that we chose.

And here you can see how nice our recycled sink looks when mounted on the new counter! A new shiny faucet really brought out the beauty in our sink, and the contrast between the red and the counter is nice. Without really planning for it, we ended up with a black and white main theme, and the red sink adds a nice 50's vintage accent. Which fits, since our old cabinets are from 1957. You can also see out window which still is in need of trim, and we need to make a ledge to fill in the bottom there. It's on the to-do list.


On Saturday of Veteran's day weekend we moved the fridge, and we had to take the thing apart, doors and hinges off to make it fit through the door. So what we had hoped would be a quick move, ended up taking several hours, specially when I saw how disgusting it really was in there when it was empty. Needless to say, that fridge had a personal close encounter with some bleach. Another thing that needed a thorough disinfecting was the water line for the automatic water dispenser and ice maker built into the fridge. Because of the well water, this part of the fridge had no been in use for 5 years. So we injected a cc or 2 of bleach into the line, ran the water until bleach came out, then let it sit overnight. The next day we flushed it out, and now we can enjoy drinking water right out of the fridge! What a luxury.

Now that the fridge was in the house, and the kitchen sink worked, we decided might as well bring a couch and the tv, and chairs for the dining table and officially move in.

Over the last several weeks we've moved the bare essentials. The beds, a dresser for each room, the couches, the computer, and the laundry. One of the unfortunate things of being in the basement and having mobile broadband for internet is that signal is poor at best. So posting the blog is really a chore when you have to wait at dial up speeds for a picture to load, and I have lacked the free time to sit there and wait. But we've been so busy just making small finishing touches here and there as well.

The main focus has been the kitchen. So little by little every night we've done something to it. We built a toe-kick for the wood base cabinet and spray painted it black to match the metal cabinets. I also spray painted the toe kick in the dishwasher black to blend it in better as well. Shawn also brought the upper cabinets from the old house, and after cleaning and putting contact paper on the shelves, he mounted them. We lived without drawer pulls for several days because I wanted to purchase new ones, since the old ones looked terrible.
When I went to Lowe's to find some new handles I was so shocked by the cost of replacing them. I also ran into the problem that these metal cabinets had handles which had holes that were closer together than the standard cabinet pulls. So of course, the only style of pull that would work was one of the most expensive ones and would have involved drilling a new hole and covering up the old one.

Since our budget is pretty much done, new handles were out of the question. Then I decided to spray paint the old pulls black just to improve them a bit. But Shawn wondered how the handles would look if he ran them through the wire brush in the benchtop grinder. He did. And what a surprise!

You can see here the old dull and peeling handle in the bottom vs. the polished one. They look practically brand new. Of course, I had thrown away a couple of handles because they had looked so bad since I had expected to buy something cheap and decent. Now we were short. Off to e-bay I go, and guess what? I find someone selling 4 of these same exact style. I was also very surprised to discover that our old metal cabinets were once very popular back in the 50's. I even saw cabinets being sold for as much as $800. Who knew! So I placed a bid on the handles and got them. This will actually turn out perfect because I needed an extra pair of handles for the new doors that Shawn will build for me to close off the space under the kitchen sink.

The electrician needed to come back to finish installing a few things, and one of them was installing some under-cabinet lights. Since the metal cabinets do not have a frame underneath them to hide these lights. Shawn built a pair out of inexpensive wood and I spray painted them black and we mounted them.
You can see it at the bottom of the upper cabinet in this picture. It adds a nice little touch to the cabinets and ties in that whole black and white theme some more.

So here it is, at last, a picture of our semi-finished kitchen. We still have to move a pair of small upper cabinets in the old house that will go above the fridge. Also, Shawn will be building a set of doors to close off the space under the sink (and now I have handles to match!) In the corner cabinet, we bought lazy susan hardware, so I now have a lazy susan on each shelf so we can access the canned goods that we're storing in there.

There a few more cosmetic things to do, not to mention most of the cabinets are empty since the vast majority of our posesions are still at the old house. So we still need to sort, clean and move all of that stuff. That space above the range hood is calling for something, so decorating will also be in our future.

This picture here shows the kitchen towards the family room side. Right after the fridge, we have a small cabinet that holds our microwave, and right next to it is a small black armoire desk that houses our computer since the "Office" will be used as Bianca's bedroom while we live down here in the basement (for the next 10 yrs, at the rate we do things). At any rate, there are recommendations that you keep the computer with internet access in the living room, just so kids don't end up going somewhere you don't want them to go when they play their games online. So works out just fine. And Shawn showed Evan a Go Diego Go simple flash game to play, and he's hooked, of course. Evan also loves watching youtube videos of trains, volcanoes, and planets. The internet can be a wonderful teaching tool. One of my priorities now is to find a good security software to prevent an accident where inappropriate sites might get accessed by mistake. I thought I wouldn't have to worry about such a thing for a while, but it's uncanny how fast a 3 year old takes to the computer!

Back to Kitchen. We love the way our kitchen turned out. Really, the only major expenses here were the range hood, the counters, and the faucet.The rest is vintage, recycled and reclaimed. So we're very proud of our green kitchen.

Here in this picture you can see how our kitchen looks today. My father in-law fixed my small rolling cart since it was falling apart. It fits just perfect in our kitchen and serves as a small island and adds a little more counter space for prep work. If you can use your imagination and imagine the floor once it the concrete is stained and polished, it will really look nice.

And finally, I'll end this post with a bit of flair. I absolutely love all of the light available in the kitchen. Shawn thinks I'm nuts for wanting so much light, but I love it! We have ambient light in the main fixture in the ceiling. Then there is a can light over the sink for task lighting, and future can lights will go up to light above the counter on each side of the stove. Someday, when we do have a peninsula for the bar, there will be pendant lights that hang from the ceiling right above the bar counter. And last but not least, there's accent lighting that also serves as task lighting in the undercabinet lights and the range hood lights. I love it.

I will do my best to update again in a week. Next, it will be to showcase my laundry area and the living area and the bedrooms. Evan's room is finally painted, though I still need a few things to finish up, but it turned out nice and he likes it. Also, we had a huge storm this past fall knock down one of our australian pine trees and it was tied to the roots by a thread and was beginning to die. So Evan and Shawn cut it down and turned it into our Christmas tree. It takes a huge corner of our family room, and I think Australian pines are not really shaped for Christmas tress, but it works. Unconventional. I like it. I'll have to show that next time.

We also have on the to-do list to buy an antenna and see if we can't boost our cell modem signal so it won't take two hours to do a post!

Until then... Merry Christmas and God bless

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!

Drywall Hanging

My pictures and posts are lagging vs. the current status of the house. So I'll post the pictures that I have from two weeks ago.

To start off, here is the vent cap that we bought online for the basement range hood. Looks pretty good, don't you think?






There's really not much to narrate about what has happened in the last two weeks since my last post, since it has mostly been drywall work. The Drywaller's worked on and off during the weekend, and it took about four days total to get all of the drywall hung. One thing that you will notice is that we do not have a ceiling. And we chose to live with the industrial look of having the ceiling exposed. We debated long and hard about making this decision because there are several pros and cons about what we chose. You basically have a choice of either a drywall ceiling, which definitely looks nicer and is cheaper compared with a suspended grid of ceiling tiles. The disadvantage of a drywall ceiling is that it is more of a permanent thing. And with having the main floor unfinished, we know we need access to the joist bays for utilities. But the problem with a suspended ceiling is that you loose headroom, since it is a dropped ceiling (and we love out 9 ft tall rooms) so we were not willing to compromise on that. The other issue was cost: basically a suspended ceiling is more expensive than drywall, but not only that, the electrician told us that rough in for the upstairs would be much higher if we have a suspended ceiling since they have to work around it. So taking all of those things into consideration, and the fact that we simply didn't have the budget to do all of the upstairs utilities at this time, we decided to go with the very unusual way of going without any ceilings at all. And since we do want drywall ceilings eventually, that was something else that merited attention.
Basically the top 6 inches or so of our drywall walls will not have texture or paint, for the simple reason that when they do come back to put in a drywall ceiling, he needs the bare drywall so that the mud job looks nice and as if we started with a drywall ceiling right off the bat.

But I am on a quest for creative ways to disguise our open ceiling while we live here with a tiny almost non-exitent budget to accomplish that. (Free stuff is going to be the key here) So we'll see what I can come up with.

 Here Evan is very excited about his bedroom actually getting some walls in. You can seen that it didn't take long for things to get very messy. But Evan loved playing in all of that white dust. His wooden train made many pitstops around the rooms.

Here's a view of my laundry closet in the Hobby/Guest Bedroom.

 And here, they are working on the bedrooms. To me it seemed like a waste to put a 12' sheet of drywall up, only to cut out the window and throw away that piece. But as Jose explain it, most drywallers will use three pieces above and three pieces below. The problem is more joints that need to be finished, which would make the taping quote higher, and the other is that the joint at the window corner will crack. This way is better. You do end up wasting some drywall, but they were really good about re-using as many pieces as they could in other spots.

 Here you can see the cubby by the fireplace without any sheetrock. Wait until I get a picture of the finished thing. Looks amazing.

 This one shows the family room in progress. Coming along quite nicely.

 A view down the hallway towards the Office, which will actually be Bianca's bedroom while we live down here.

 The view of the drywall above the shower. The Bathroom and the Storm Shelter room were the only two rooms which will actually have a drywall ceiling. The reason is that both of these rooms needed insulation in the ceiling, and it needed to be contained. But you can get a glimpse of what the future holds for the rest of the basement. (If we can save up the money, I'm hoping that this will be in Phase III of our project).

 Here's a view of the bathroom where the sink cabinets will be located. Because budget is really tight right now, we're looking for creative ways to save money where we can, and live with some things for a while until we can upgrade.
When my in-laws came to visit a week ago, we took a trip down to the Habitat for Humanity Re-Store in Des Moines. It's like the Goodwill of construction materials.
We did find a nice 8 ft oak double sink vanity for $250 (A brand new double sink vanity top alone starts at $750)
To say it was a bargain was an understatement. However, there was no way we could get an 8ft one piece monster to turn the corner down the hall. So we had to pass it up.
Also, the electrician finally came up with the bill, and it is a couple of grand more than we were expecting! So there goes the budget for a lot of things. So we had to make some choices about the things that we need to get to moved in, and what will have to wait until we can save up the money again.

This next picture is a rough stage view of where the toilet will go. We did go to Lowe's and picked up a toilet this past weekend, so it's on the queue of things to install in the next couple of weeks. Very exciting indeed.

 Here's a shot of the Shelter, or the Vault as the drywaller's call it. Wait till I get a chance to take some pictures of the finished thing. What a difference.

And here you can see Juan as he very carefully works around the trickiest wall. It was very important that they not hit any pipe or wire and you can see there was a lot of them in this one wall alone!


They finished hanging all of the drywall on a Friday, and Juan and Jose spent the rest of day laying paper down to cover all of the floors to keep the drywall mud from making an even bigger mess. Then the finishing crew came in on Saturday to place the first coat of mud and tape all of the seams. On Tuesday they came back to sand it all down and to put a second coat of mud. On Thursday they returned to sand it all smooth, then on Friday Jose came back to throw the texture on the walls.
We went with what they call Orange peel, which is supposed to be the texture of the outside of an orange. Very neat.

Jose still has to finish the mechanical room and the fireplace before he is done, but he will do those on days he doesn't have other jobs.
In the meantime, we have begun to prime the walls! We'll start off getting the safe room painted and dry so we can move some of the things that we need to store long term, like the window screens for upstairs and floor registers that we already have, and hings like paint, caulk, etc that can't be outside to freeze in the garage. So we went to Menards this past weekend to take advantage of a 25% off sale on light fixtures (talk about God's timing again) and bought 10 gallons of primer, and an exterior door that we will use to close off the basement at the base of the stairs.


So tonight Shawn began to frame the door because our radiant floor system is actually in operation and we need to keep the heat in. That's right! You're eyes are not deceiving you! WE HAVE HEAT! Praise goes to the Lord, for he has led us to this point! I couldn't be any happier about how the whole thing turned out.
It felt weird not having anything to do while the drywaller's were at work (ok, we had plenty that we could have been doing, but we took a break). Eventually we couldn't stand it any longer, specially when the temps dipped into the low 30's at night. With a slab full of pipes full of water, that's a scary thought, not to mention that our pluming is operational and the pipes are full of water as well. So we made the low voltage electrical connections for the the pump, the system relay controller, all of the zone valves, and wired the thermostats. We set the thermostats and went to bed. The next morning we went to check, the outside temperature was 45ºF, and our basement was nice and toasty at 60º. I can definitely now believe why they claim that radiant heat is a much more "comfortable" heat in which you can have a lower temp. set on the thermostat and still feel cozy. Our floors got up to 70ºF. and it was like walking on a nice heated pad. Nice! I'm so going to be spoiled by this.

The other thing that Shawn has done since the last post, is that he once again rolled out the insulation on the main floor so we can keep our heat in the basement. I'll need to take some pictures again. In the walkway we didn't want to leave it just the subfloor since it will let heat out, so we settled with recycling a pile of scraps of blue foam that we had leftover from two years ago when the slab was poured. Talk about being green!

As soon as we're done painting the storm shelter, we'll move onto the bathroom so that Shawn can get the toilet in, and do something about a sink. But basically as soon as we're done painting, the electrician can come back and do the trim out to install all of the switches, outlets, and light fixtures. It's getting to be an exciting time!
It always seems like every year we're in some sort of crunch to beat the snow. This year, we're on the clock to beat the weather from freezing that garden hose that is supplying water to the old house from the new house!
I so hope we can be moved in before that happens! Even if it means the basement won't be as finished as we'd like.
But who cares! We have heat! I can't wait to say bye-bye to our whole house space heater and move into the luxury of radiant heat!

Until next time.