Getting Closer

This last week, Tyler and I spent Monday-Thursday working on the house. My mom was sweet enough to watch our little peanut and my goodness, we missed her!  But, we were able to get a lot done!

Our flooring order came in right before we left so we had to haul that up there. The original plan was to hook up our trailer and pull it with the Vue but we hit a deer on our last trip up to Michigan so the car was stuck in the repair shop. Plan B was to pull the trailer up with his parent’s taurus but that wasn’t looking like a very good idea since the roads were  fairly snowy and the weight of the trailer with the load was at it’t maximum/ a little over for the car and for the trailer. So instead, his Dad ended up coming up with us with the pallet of flooring in the back of his work truck, and ended up staying up there and helping out for the day. He was such a help! He helped Tyler fix up his new drywall, leveled some floor and Tyler picked his brain on some other random issues.

Alright so now for the house update. If you recall, Tyler had opened up the doorway to the living room and got some wall patching done. I started painting the office right away on Monday and that took me until mid Tuesday to finish completely. Unfortunately even with primer in my paint, it takes more than one coat on the ceilings and trim 😦

Here’s what that looked like after some fresh beautiful paint. We went with the color “riverdale” hand picked by my hubs. 

Pretty right? It’s a very soft blue green.

Anyway, while I was doing that, Tyler started on the flooring! We were planning on carpeting all the bedrooms and doing the laminate in the rest of the house but I calculated off the real estate paper of the house rather than physically measuring and we ended up with quite a bit extra so we decided to put the hard flooring in the master bedroom and office too. He started in the master bedroom and got it done in a day, it looks INCREDIBLE!!

Seriously it’s perfect. He is waiting to do the office now until he has all of the main part done just to make sure he has enough. He started making his way out the hallway and I moved out to the living room to start painting the ceiling. Holy cow guys…if you’ve ever painted ceilings then maybe you can sympathize, but that SUCKED! My back and neck felt and still feel way out of wack, but it was worth it. The entire house was painted in a dingy yellowish cream color so I gave all the ceilings a fresh coat of pure flat white. You can really see the difference side by side.

This picture was also taken at night with only a warm colored light bulb for light so its hard to see the freshness but you can still see the contrast. This is it finished. 

This was after 3 coats and by that point I was pretty much just saying good enough. But it really does look good. By Wednesday night I had all the ceilings painted (minus the 2 rooms we won’t be using right away).

By the time I had both the kitchen and living room ceilings painted Tyler had finished up the majority of the hallway flooring.

It is finally starting to look like a home and less like a project. Next we made a trip to home depot to pick up our wall paint and I got started on that while Tyler finished the hallway and closet flooring. We chose a soft warm gray and decided to continue it all throughout the main part of the house. May seem rather boring to some, but I LOVE neutrals and love a calm monotone look and Tyler doesn’t seem to mind. 😉

Before Tyler could lay flooring in the kitchen we had to smooth out the subfloor which was covered in nail, staples, and glued down pieces of flooring from the previous owner. It was rough! We literally had to take a hammer and chisel to get that crap up. We hammered most of the nails down and tried to pull out most of the staples but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t just smash down a bunch of staples because pulling them out was no easy task. You can kind of see just how bad it was in this picture. All those little spots are nails or staples. 

It was tedious and I had a bunch of wood splinters stuck in my pants when we were done but we did get it mostly leveled out. Not perfect by any means but it’ll do.

By the end of Thursday I was able to get all the of the main living walls (kitchen, living room, and hallway) painted. Minus the ceiling edge in the kitchen and hallway, but the main part of the walls are all coated and I love the color.

Meanwhile, Tyler spent his time finishing the flooring from the hallway and into the kitchen! The only areas he has left to do laminate in is the living room and office! We will wait to carpet the other two until we are living there and can snag a really good deal on some remnants. For now, the office will just be Evelyn’s room until we can finish her’s.  We also purchased our kitchen appliances this week which took up a good half day since we had to do some driving around to compare prices and deals. They aren’t anything fancy but they’re pretty decent still and will look fantastic in the kitchen once its all fixed up and awesome looking. 🙂 

So there you have it. Those are the main things we got done this week. It may not sound like a lot but all of those projects were time consuming and they make the biggest impact on the house so it feels like a huge deal.I am planning to try and spend a day over there sometime this week and finish up the painting, but we’ll just have to wait and see if that ends up working out. It’s already looking so much more fresh and up to date. It will be a truly beautiful home and I can’t wait to get in there and start making happy memories!

 

UPDATE: Tyler had a good amount of time Today (Monday) and was able to finish the flooring in the living room!! It looks incredible and I absolutely cannot wait to see it in person. He needs to get the flooring in the office done and I need to finish up some painting and then I think we’ll be about ready to move in! Not done fixing it up by any means but the rest will be done while we live there. 🙂 

That’s tape above the trim btw.