Saturday, September 28, 2013

All done

It's not perfect. But the painting is done, and I think we are convinced that in the future, it will be done by professionals. 

At least today I got minimal paint on the floor. 
After the first coat, we ran some errands, then came home and did the second.


Our contractor came for awhile as well, and he brought the shower walls. We love how they look with the blue. 



Supposedly by the end of the week, we'll have a functioning bathroom again!

Yaaaaay!!!

Painting Day

We primed the bathroom and painted the ceiling last night. 

We are tackling the walls this morning. I'll post pictures when that is done. 

Friday, September 27, 2013

Grouted

The floor is grouted!!! We are both super pleased with our tile and grout choices, but finally having the floor had us rethinking the paint. 
So, more sampling. This was a color we had sampled, but we wanted to see how it looked near the tile. 
We are pretty happy with it. It's an Olympic color called Abracadabra. 
And, since we had settled on the other color, I had to dig the sample out of the recycling. Awesome. 
We'll be using plain white on the trim. Unfortunately the trim was already poorly painted once. 
Hopefully another coat will actually hide the blue. 


Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Floor!

When I got home today, the tile was down. It still needs to be grouted, but I can see enough to feel happy with what we picked. 

I think it will look even better when the walls are painted. 

Monday, September 23, 2013

Look what's missing!

Apologies for the double post, this one didn't go up over the weekend!

That's right folks, the old Washer and Dryer got picked up by Habitat Saturday morning. (The Habitat ReStore will come haul away your functional appliances. Also we found out that their Columbia store will start having Sunday hours soon.)
Here is our new stacked unit. We got the biggest one we could. Check out the dryer!

Plus, the lint trap is at the front!
Other bathroom progress is being made. 

Shower pan went in!
More paint samples went up. 
We think we are going with the boring gray on the left. It's such a small space that I'm worried the darker gray paint will be too dark. 

Unfortunately, the washer dryer isn't installed. So I spent Sunday at the place quarters go to die. 

Also, they had two sizes of dryer but the price was the same. I don't really know the difference and was too embarrassed to ask, so I used the giant dryers until my quarters ran out and then took my mostly dry clothes home.



Craft Space

I'm a big crafter, so 5-6 large boxes of craft stuff have been camping out in our guest room while we try to decide how to arrange the office/craft room.  We finally made some progress. 
 
First, we hung the pegboard.
Technically, first we painted it - it was a lovely blue that looked terrible against the wall, so we painted it the same gray that is in the kitchen.  Pegboard is really easy to paint.
Now that I have the pegboard, I've been able to get a bunch of my scissors, stamps, thread, and other items up and out of the way. 
 
We also finally hung the elfa shelving.  We have two sets, one on either side of the door.  The other side is for office supplies and the router and stuff. 
 
Over the weekend, I finally got around to rearranging the shelves, which had become a dumping ground.
The printer is wireless, so it's going to live downstairs.  And so I finally got my fabric into new bins and up on the shelves.  The bins are sterilite bins from Target and I bought 2 enormous ones and a set of 5 small shoeboxes.  I searched for craft room inspiration and fabric storage ideas, and somebody recommended keeping fat quarters/quilting scraps in shoeboxes, which I thought was a great idea. It lets me sort by project or color.  I have a sixth shoe box that I bought for keeping all the birthday cards, etc. that people send me that are really sweet or sentimental and I don't want to get rid of.  (It was a stor-all bankers box before we moved, so good job downsizing, self!)
 
At the moment, the plan is to keep my serger on the bottom shelf, but I'm not sure how well that will go. There is still at least one giant box to unpack of crafting miscellany.  I decided last night to take a good sort through my beads and then maybe sell/freecycle them because I don't like what I have, I don't enjoy beading as a hobby, and they take up a lot of room. 

 
 

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Progress


Bathroom has framing! It's pretty easy to imagine how it will work. 

The door is actually staying in the same spot. 
The toilet will be against this corner. 

This is our lovely shower stall. 



Monday, September 16, 2013

Pinspiration

Sometimes, Pinterest gets a little ridiculous.  Fortunately, now there is somebody who shares in my halfhearted attempts at homemaking and captions them in amusing ways.  Check out the Mother F*cking Homemaking board for a laugh and some valuable tips like:

I use this timesaving tip every morning (that I bother making the bed.) 
 

Saturday, September 14, 2013

A Tour

It seems unfair to continue writing about the house without offering a tour.  So without further ado (all photos personal, please do not copy/paste/repost/pin)
 
Living Room
I don't think I'll ever get over opening the door to this.
 
Two ceiling fans!
 
Or walking through this.
Dining Room
 
Getting to cook in this:
Kitchen

Kitchen
A reno of this bathroom is in the works - that tiled portion next to the tub might become a closet/storage, and the plan is to add a much wider vanity and medicine cabinet with additional storage.
Upstairs Bath

Upstairs Bath - window and vanity
I love the wall color in our bedroom - it's a lovely sage color. 

Master Bedroom
The guest room, aka our bedroom for the first week we lived in the house while we awaited the delivery of the bed.


The office/second guest room.  I love this wall color as well.  I dislike that you have to walk through this room to go to the bathroom.  Everyone asks why this isn't the master, but it seems rude to have the master be the only room with access to the bathroom, and also you can't fit a queen sized bed and night tables in it because the doors are weird. 
Office/guest room

 

Friday, September 13, 2013

Washer/Dryer Woes

We have to both get rid of the old washer and dryer, and pick out a new stacked unit.  This is frustrating because it turns out that nobody wants to buy a perfectly good washer dryer, and because new stacked units are pricy. 

Our old washer dryer is a matched set, in perfect working condition.  The general craigslist value seems to be about $200 if you cannot offer a warranty or delivery.  We have been unable to get any interest on ours so far, because we refused to discount them that much at this point.  At some point, we may be better off donating them to Habitat's Restore and taking the tax write off (but that will require itemizing and I didn't get receipts for everything else we donated so it would be frustrating to do it now.) 

Our new washer dryer is the GE Unitized 27" with gas dryer.  The 3.4 cubic foot capacity is still twice the capacity of our old washer, so we're pretty excited.

I'm sure some people might wonder why anyone would go with one of these units:
(source)
instead of two of these bad boys stacked on top of each other:

Samsung 3 Series 3.6 cu ft High-Efficiency Front-Load Washer (Blue) ENERGY STAR
(Source)

 
Ultimately, it came down to two issues - price, and convenience.  In the three weeks we've had a front loading dryer, I have hated taking clothes out of the low dryer.  One of the reviews I read talked about how painful it was to bend down to get clothes out of a front-loading washer.  We decided that a stacked unit is more convenient for a number of reasons - it's much easier to just put the clothes from the top loading washer into the dryer, and it's much nicer to not have to bend down at all to put the clothes in either the washer or dryer.  Also, the front loaders would set us back at least another $500 more than the stacked.   There were generally mixed reviews about the front loaders, saying they don't get clothes clean enough, etc.

With the new unit, it will be just off the kitchen and pretty visible, so I might end up being disappointed that we didn't choose the more aesthetically pleasing unit, but hopefully that's going to turn out to be one of those things I really don't care about.

 



Thursday, September 12, 2013

50 Shades of White




Our second painting project in the house was the closet doors.  They were pretty beat up and I thought a simple coat of white paint would help freshen them up and make them a little brighter. 

It was not worth it.  They took forever to paint, and the hallway is so dark you can barely notice a difference. 

Firstly, we bought a high gloss white paint in the basic white color at our local hardware store.  The doors were white before, so I didn't think it would be that big a deal if I didn't get full coverage, etc. 



 
There are about 5 million shades of white.  Lesson learned.  The fronts I painted with a straight brush and a trim roller.  It took forever, my hand hurt, and I wound up needing to do two coats just to cover the old white with the new white and make it look good. 

 
I found a tutorial that suggested painting the insidy parts of the boxes first.  It didn't help make anything easier or with getting more coverage. 

 
Because we set the doors against the wall on a dropcloth, painting the bottom of the doors was also a challenge.
 
 
Finally they were done, and while you can clearly see they are not very well done in this photo, I was ready to call it "good enough" and decided we would live with the doors as they are. 
 
I searched a number of Pinterest Tutorials about painting, and a lot of them suggested the "shockingly easy" tip of lining your paint pan with tin foil and then throwing it out.  Listen, folks.  They make these amazing amazing paint trays that are lined with Teflon.  They are the best thing ever.  They are cheaper than a roll of tin foil.



I did read a tip to soak my brushes in vinegar and hot water to get the paint off of them, and it helps a lot - the bristles don't get so stiff, and the paint comes off a bit easier.  If anyone has any tips for cleaning rollers, they are appreciated.  This tutorial suggests using fabric softeners, so I think maybe a dryer sheet in a bucket will help us out next week when we have to paint the bathroom. 

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Still unsustainable.

The bikes moved into the living room to make space for the Washer/Dryer. 


The contractor is coming tomorrow to hopefully level the floor. 

Someday, we will have a dining room. I'm hoping for October.