Four Days Later

We made it!  The trim is up and most of the doors are hung.  It's great to see what the place looks like with proper trim, and the best part is seeing things getting closer to finished.  We decided to paint the trim ourselves, so we've spent a few hours this weekend filling nail holes and caulking, two rooms down, six to go.  I foresee this part of the project taking awhile since not only do we need to patch and paint the new trim, we have to patch and paint windows that were never painted by the previous owner.  While we're at it we need to patch and paint drywall where it got nicked up over the past couple months.

Max is trying to understand why we keep scurrying around, but so far he seems to appreciate the new trim.

 New doors on the first floor, painting these doors are on the to do list as well.  The door knobs are in the mail, I promise.

 We only made it about 50% of the way here.  The door needs to be stained and it needs a new door knob, but there's a bigger problem.   See that pesky duct in the upper left hand corner?

It's preventing a door from being properly trimmed, the door fits in the opening just fine, but we wouldn't be able to cover up the space between the door jamb and the drywall.  So we called out an HVAC company to see if we could move it or put in a smaller one.  After a crew of four people ran around for 15 minutes, up and down ladders, in and out of the attic, and had the thing ripped open it turns out it can't be moved and a smaller duct won't work.  Bummer.  

We're considering all kinds of options to get around it: 1. move the door into the bathroom, to where the bulkhead ends, 2. put the door up at a 45 degree angle under the duct, or 3. even moving the whole wall out about three feet so we can get three more feet of space into the bathroom.  Lots to think about there.

Meanwhile we'll be plenty busy with patching and painting about 1300 feet of trim in the rest of the house.

Our next big project if we don't figure out the bathroom first will be replacing the windows and the front door.  We put our application in for the City to consider and we have to go through the hearing process again in a few weeks.  Hopefully it will be less painful than last time.

Adventures in Trim and Doors

Day 1 of 3*

(*the contractor says 3, I say 5, we'll see)

All the furniture gets moved to the middle of the room so the carpenters get to the baseboards; some doors arrive; trim gets removed; the wrong door gets taken down; an HVAC company gets called; and the new baseboards and trim arrive 4 hours later.

Before, door down and everything pushed around.

The baseboards arrived

Spring, the second season.

The weather turned nice really early this year so we headed outdoors.  We took out the remnants of the kitchen vent, patched both the drywall and the siding.  We ripped out the last piece of chain link fence and extended the rock wall in the front yard.  We got rid of all the grass in the front yard and planted a bunch of things, some were more successful than others, but I blame the abnormal early spring for that.  

In the back we made the vegetable garden bigger and discovered a crazy amount of "wild" tomato plants that just popped up.  We started seeds in the spring for tomatoes, peppers, basil and flowers.  What Dexter didn't eat made it into the garden and we now have a bumper crop of tomatoes and basil.

The biggest outdoor project was adding the patio in the back.  Not a DIY project. We hemmed and hawed over doing it ourselves, got a few quotes and then realized we should just pay someone.  Nobody wants to get divorced over an amateur ability to level concrete.  Instead it took a crew of three guys four days to level the yard, pour concrete, lay flagstone and clean up.  Two parties later we can say it's one of our favorite investments.  In fact, the backyard cat has really taken to the patio.  More often than not we come home to find him sprawled out on it and if he's really comfy, upside down.

This is before, the backyard cat is lounging in a mud pit where we used to have pavers under the grill.

After the cement was poured.

The view today

We swapped out the light fixtures too.

This is Fred's corner, he even has a little garden.

This is our contribution to the patio scene.  1200 lbs of rocks, loaded into our car and unloaded here.  

Semi-annual Update

It's time for your semi-annual update!  Otherwise known as, I'm on vacation this week, but at home so I have time to post.

This week we finally got all the pieces in place to have trim and some interior doors installed, so not only will I update you on what we did over the past 8 months, I'll almost be up to date on posting the latest project!

In somewhat chronological order, here's the first thing we did in 2012:  New Railings!

This is one of the coolest things we've had done.  The railings were custom made and arrived in big pieces and were welded together in place.  There's a shot of the previous railings in the post below, it's clear this  is an upgrade.

Second Act 2012: the laundry room.  What was supposed to be a one weekend project turned into a two weekend project, and two weekends without laundry.  But a totally DIY project that only took two weekends isn't bad around here.

Before:  bare lightbulb, really ugly green walls and gym mats on the floor.

In the middle:  we put down a layer of Durock over the sub floor, patched drywall, painted the room turquoise, installed charcoal tile on the floor, moved everything back into the room, installed new outlet and switch covers and a new light fixture.  Whew.  The most difficult part was actually getting the dryer hooked back up to the vent.

At the end we had this.  Still no doors, but definitely an improvement.  It looks much better in person, it's a hard room to photograph.