Our New Old House

Hi all,

I haven’t written here in a very long time and I’m so sorry to have left you hangin’. We rushed up on a deadline to have the house appraised last month and so we did TONS of work but I haven’t had time to blog about it until now.  But don’t worry, I took pictures!  I have no idea what order anything happened in now, so I’ll just go room by room and get you up to speed.  Let’s start with the bathroom today.

When last I blogged, the bathroom looked like…  this!

There was still some wallpaper residue on the walls so Brandon scraped it off.

Then he scrubbed the walls to make them ready to prime.

With this latest push to get work done on the house, we’ve had to cut some corners in the short term so we could have it appraised. We haven’t abandoned all our long term plans yet, but in the interest of time and sanity, we had to just give many things a quick going over to make it look clean and finished for the bean counters. Hence, everything got painted white and we had to come up with some quick fixes for some problems with the walls.

For example, in the bathroom we want to put beadboard paneling on the wall below the wood trim that splits the top and the bottom half of the wall. We didn’t have time to do that so my friend Tiff (who’s a GENIUS!) suggested that we put contact paper on the walls as a kind of temporary wallpaper. So that’s what we did.

I guess it’s time for a before and after look, huh?

Before:

…and AFTER:

Oh, I just noticed that the spot under the sink where the pipes go into the wall looks a lot better now in real life than it did in this picture.  This was before we did a little more work to clean it up.

But anyway, that’s the bathroom, getting close to being done!

And here’s a bonus photo of Brandon scraping the hallway wall (coz I don’t know where else to put it.)

[tags] bathroom, wallpaper, ceramic tile, paint, paneling, photos, future plans, flooring [/tags]

In tearing out a cabinet to install the dishwasher, we discovered several paint colors our kitchen had once been:

Color Inspiration: strained peas and mac n’ cheese.

[tags]paint, photos, kitchen, dishwasher[/tags]

Brandon and I finished putting up the fascia this weekend so the gutter guys could come put up the gutters this morning.

I primed the boards before we put them up.

Then we nailed them onto the ends of the rafters.

Brandon was a wiz at measuring and cutting the boards to fit. We ended up with just the right amount of wood and just a little bit of waste. But we’ll keep the extra pieces for some other project in the future.

Gutter guys are working to put up the gutters now. More pictures when they’re done!

[tags]gutters, fascia, photos[/tags]

We had central air installed at the end of last month and a couple weeks ago we had a duct run up to the attic so we can use that room comfortably year round. 

Now I need to look into options for improving the insulation of the attic.

[tags]attic, ceiling, insulation, air conditioning, photos[/tags]

Here’s the back gate in my back yard.  It’s in the middle of an incomplete fence which is not going to keep anyone out of anything.  But it is heavily fortified against anyone who’d try to wrestle it open through the trees that have grown up through it.  I guess the previous owners thought a heavy chain and padlock were necessary for the protection of the weeds in the back yard.

We’re going to tear this gate and fence out at some point anyway, so I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t find the key to that lock. But one day I was going down the basement stairs and the light was just right and something caught my eye:

It’s a Master brand key. I haven’t taken it down to see if it fits the lock yet, but it’s nice to know it’s there.

[tags]yardwork, previous owners, photos[/tags]