Moved in ........now I need to catch up on blogging

We are officially moved into our not-completely-finished house. It was a incredibly nice day on Wednesday, for being December 26th, so we felt blessed to get such a nice day to move. We had the help of several friends and family members, without them I don't think I would be able to move my tired old body today. My uncle Chris, who not only helped us move, but also lugged away all of the brush we have had in our front yard for like 3 months to his compost pile. The thought has even crossed our minds to finally rake up our leaves. That requires that is stops raining for a day or two and isn't sub-zero weather....we'll see when that gets done.

I described our current living situation as a nice camping trip. I wash my face and brush my teach at the water spouts for the laundry with a bucket to catch the water and our toilet should be going in as we speak. We luckily have had use of other facilities thus far, but I don't think I will ever be so glad to see a porcelain throne in working condition. Our bathroom is so close to being 95% done and once it is our time can finally be spent doing other things. I do have some pictures to update the blog with. I will try to get that done in the next few days but it isn't likely that we will have Internet available at home yet so it might be next week before that happens.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas and got some R&R and great food, I know we enjoyed those things, especially this Christmas, even if it was only for a few hours at at time.

Its starting to look like a finished house....

It finally feel like we are getting stuff done. Here is a list of what has been completed so far in the last few weeks:

1. Kitchen has drywall up with the exception of the area on the ceiling and around the patio door.
2. Can lights have been installed in the kitchen.
3. Kitchen and bath areas have new subfloor and underlayment of some type.
4. Full bath has almost all the drywall up and now has a ceiling (woo hoo for not heating the attic!!), we just need to finish getting drywall/cement board up around the bathtub and then we will be ready to tape, mud and sand the drywall.
5. The purple room is no longer purple and after 3 coats of primer is now white, we'll decide on a color later.
6. And probably one of the most visual changes from this weekend is documented below:
   
   Here is our living room area before we started painting you will notice a portion is an nice light robins egg blue, while the other wall nicely coordinated with a deep avocado green

Below the ghostly looking room is in the process of being rid of those nasty colors. With the help of my parents and good friends Michelle and Steve we were able to get 2 coats of primer in this room and the dining room on Saturday.
And then finally on Sunday we were able to paint it the finish coat. It is Ralph Lauren paint in the color "Sisal." I would highly recommend this paint it is only a few dollars more than the Behr or Valspar paints and it went on so easily and covered great. They also have a great palette of colors.

So this room is fairly close to being done. We just need to change all of the outlets and covers and get the baseboards up. We are leaving the floor to the professionals, we are not going to try our hand at installing carpet.

Stay tuned for more updates they should start getting more fun in the changes that you see :)!!!!

The bathroom stuff

I forgot to mention in my last post that I also purchased our full bath vanity top last week at Home Depot. I had looked at it before but went down the aisle and noticed it was $100 off so I went ahead and picked it up. It is one of the ready to go granite tops, I don't know how else to explain it but here is a picture.

And here is the vanity cabinet we plan on getting

Progress.....we have some kitchen walls

So we at least got some of the drywall up this weekend. On Saturday we had a bunch of people come and help. My Uncle Skyler helped Adam with some odds and ends and then was on the drywall crew once that started going up. Our friend Chad came and lended a hand to the drywall, also due to his above average height he helped me with some taping I was doing so I didn't have to use the step ladder :) My uncle Mark and cousin Daniel were back to help with the electrical. Also my friend Michelle came and helped me tape the other bedroom for painting and then wipe down walls in the living room. We got a lot accomplished and hopefully by the pictures below you notice progress. Poor Adam spent half of Saturday on his stomach doing and army crawl through the attic (our attic is not very tall), the poor guy has either been beneath or above this house for 80% of the time so far. Prior to everyone arriving on Saturday we also got some underlayment done in the dining and kitchen, as well as, can lights installed and ready for wiring.

I say it looks like we live in that thing that they put E.T. into because he was sick (oh come on 80's kids you know what I'm talking about). Anyway we had put in the insulation and then covered it with this 6 mil plastic sheathing as a vapor barrier, the drywall then goes on top of that.
Ta da we had 12 feet of wall at this point a vast improvement over zero!!
Below is the room were we are keeping all the stuff, and I tried to get a picture of one of our cabinets (you can see the side in the left part of the picture). Thanks to Adam's Dad we picked up all of the cabinets and counter tops, as well as our stove and microwave. Now it is all just waiting for installation.
And here is a quick picture of our counter tops.

This week we will be trying to complete as much drywall as possible. I am planning to start painting the ceilings and priming the walls in the rooms we aren't doing anything to from a wall perspective.

Pictures -- Warning: They may be boring!

So I took some pictures of progress, they probably aren't very exciting to anyone but Adam and I, but progress nonetheless.

Purple room before anything, and after being cleaned up and taped, ready for painting.

Bathroom with new window installed and new subfloor; to replace the icky stuff that was in there.

Above is the before of the kitchen and below is what is currently looks like-- new windows again.

Now these are the most exciting ones below, not really. But it is the now organized and working utitlity room with our new water softner and the infamous (nearly-blew-up-our-house) water heater, that is now fixed. Also my favorite-- the new furnace!!

Heat....glorious Heat!!!!

We now have been blessed by the Citizens Gas gods and can run our furnace due to passing the inspection and being able to turn on the heat.

The inspector initially came out on Friday morning to run a test on our line to make sure there were no leaks. Well... there was a small leak that he thought might be coming from a fitting on an old union. There were only about 3 parts from the meter to the furnace/water heater that were not replaced so we figured it was one of those. Thus I make a mad dash to the black pipe aisle at Home Depot and in the meantime John, Adam's dad, arrives to help out. John brought with him a pipe wrench that was seriously the size of a 3 year old, it was the largest wrench I have ever seen in my life. Well the toddler size wrench must have done the job because when Citizens guy arrived the next day there were no leaks. I have never been so happy to hear a furnace running. It was ridiculous we were putting our hands in front of the vents like it was blowing out the answer to the fountain of youth or something.

Then the Citizens guy went to light the pilot on the water heater and about got his eyebrows singed. I guess the control box had some loose screws so when he went to light the pilot there was some built up gas and it basically backfired a bit and scared the bageebees out of Citizens guy and Adam. Adam made a very firm request to Sears to get someone out ASAP to take a look at it and/or replace it, since it was obviously a problem with the manufacturing and not anything we could have done. Sears guy came on Monday and replaced the box, also stating he had never seen anything like that before (lucky us!!).

So now we have both heat and hot water and are no longer living like the Amish. Now we can ask people to come help us and we don't have to preempt it by saying to make sure you wear 4 layers to stay warm :)

Other things we accomplished this weekend:

1. Adam and my dad finished setting all of the new windows and sprayed the "Great Stuff" for insulation and then caulked them all.

2. Mom and I have one of the bedrooms completely taped and are ready to go in with the paint sprayer and prime that room.

Our goal is to start hanging drywall this weekend, so if there are any of you out there that would like to get a workout this weekend and just a little bit dusty we would be more than happy to help you accomplish your goals.

Sparkling floors, new pipes, and our first casualty.....

Well it has been a while since I blogged but a lot of work has been going on that I thought I should report. I have forgotten to take my camera these last few time to the house, but will try this weekend so I can have some pictures for the blog. Here is a rundown on what has been going on:

• Adam and his Dad have finished nearly all the plumbing the only thing left is something to do with the outside spickets. We are now ready to test all the plumbing to make sure we don't have any leaks.
• Our furnace was installed and is just waiting for the gas to be turned on. (Luckily with the weather this last week a furnace hasn't been necessary).
• The house is finally rid of all wall paper. While "escavating" the wall near the front door I noticed that there were 2 layers of wallpaper, I then started seeing a portion of what looked like a picture of an old Roman statue. I took pictures with my phone so I will try to get those up b/c it has to be the most interesting wallpaper I saw during my time with this little project.
• I have taken the old layer of wax off of the original hardwood floors in both of the bedrooms. The floor in the "purple room" has also had new wax reapplied and buffed back to a shine. I want to put another coat on but I am waiting for the heat to come on. The other room has a few damaged wood planks so we need to replace those before I can finish that floor.
• Our deal of the week last week was our toilets( I know who braggs about a "deal" on a toliet). We had gone to Home Depot for something unrelated and we decided to see if they had anything in the toilet aisle on sale, low-and-behold they had a toilet that was originally $269 on clearence for $47.50 and it was an American Standard. There was only one left at the 38th St. HD so we asked my parents to pick up another one at the C,ville HD. We got 2 toilets for under $100!!
• Our windows are kind of in.....I will elaborate on that a little further in a minute :(
• Nearly all of the subfloor in the full bathroom has been replaced and we have dry fitted the tub.

And now for the casualty....

My poor dear husband has been having a heck of a time with the windows. A 54 year old house that had the old aluminum windows is not always the easiest when it comes to the replacement process. First of all not all of the rough opening were level so he had to rework those a bit to get the window to sit in the framing plumb (and yes I now know all these "technical" words and actually what they mean). Then he had to take a layer of brick off and mortar back in the limestone sill so the window could sit properly on the sill. A small casualty was that one of the sills fell during this process and broke into about 3 pieces, but he was able to get it back up and it doesn't look too bad, nothing a flower box can't hide :) Then for the big one......... last night he was trying to get the windows pushed out to where they needed to sit on the sill. The one in the laundry room was "stuck" but I'm guessing when Adam turned to get a tool it got "unstuck" because on my way back up to the house from taking the garbage out, I heard bang, the crash of many pieces of glass breaking, and a number of words I should not type on such a famiy friendly blog. The window had gone to meet its maker so soon after arriving out our house, and so goes our first casualty. Of course the part of the window that broke was the permanent panel and not the moving panel that could probably be ordered seperately as a replacement piece. The worst part is that the windows have to be special ordered and can take 2 to 3 weeks to get back. At least it is just the laundry room and not a big deal if we have a few finishing things once we move in. Right now we put the window back up and then just covered the broken side with plastic.

So as you can see we have been busy and so far the process has had a range of emotions from exciting and fun to exhausted and frustrated, but we are getting there and hopefully soon the pictures I post will be something resembling an almost finished house.