21 days to go

Hola from the passenger seat of our beloved work horse, Ricks truck. (While jamming to Beck of course!) 

We have an incredible feeling of accomplishment and "holy shit we're never going to finish". Like, literally 50/50 of both of those feelings. It sucks. Plus add lack of sleep thanks to a squirmy hungry 5 month old. Oye. 

I ran around the house and took pictures of current conditions before we hopped in the car to head to Menards. Oh! That's why I'm writing to you from the truck! Our master bathroom vanity arrived and we need more boards to finish our mudroom ceiling and all of that is our at Menards in st.joe Missouri. (45 minute drive for us)

Ricks mom went back to Erie, PA a week ago on Tuesday after her three week visit and on Thursday my mom arrived for two weeks to help us take care of Peggy while we work on the house.   This weekend is going to be a bit of a nightmare. Ricks dad and step mom are coming for the weekend. So we're juggling their visit, my mom and doing our best not to be assholes to any of them  as we explain, "thanks for visiting, great to see you, but we got less than three weeks to finish all of this!" (Insert both of us stretching out our arms to point out the lack of walls in the mudroom, third floor and a master bathroom with nothing in it.  Plus all the other little crap we have to do!) 

we have a tile guy coming Saturday to start building a custom shower for our master bathroom. So Rick is under pressure to build the box the shower will be housed in. Now that we will soon have our vanity we will be on a mission to finish the master bathroom we have never had in the three plus years of living in the house! Rick is almost done setting up the pex plumbing for the bathroom. 

We also had a guy come reinstall our heat and a/c duct work for the second floor. We had to rearrange them to have a big open master bathroom. So! So! Thankful we paid someone to do that! He was the first person we paid to do something on the house. Well with the exception of paying someone to work on our original tile roof that is 3-4 stories high. We said hell no to that last year haha.  We could have done the vents but it would have taken us a week probably instead it took this guy two days. 

My plan today when we get home is to paint part of our upstairs hallway and then clean up that part of the hallway floor so I can get a coat of polyurethane on the floor. We're putting one last coat of polyurethane on all the floors as we finish each room. Holy crap what a difference it makes! I keep thinking the floors are wet! What shine! And we are using satin finish! I'm also optimistic to get really close to having the sunroom emptied out so we can sand the floors and get that room finished by early next week. Which with the exception of the master bathroom and maybe replacing the floor in the guest bathroom the second floor will be finished! Hot dog! 

So, don't mind the mess in the pictures. I really just snapped pictures and hopped into th truck!

Master bedroom. We bought stuff to decorate the fire place to take a picture and then return it haha. Oh staging you're a funny thing. We're buying blinds for the Windows, waiting for paint to dry on the door to the bathroom so we can rehang it and shut the door to hide the wreck the bathroom is for pictures and we have a fancy bed spread besides those few things it's ready for pictures! 

Master bathroom. Wreck! And Henry! 

We just have a few staging things to do in the dinning room and it's ready for pictures! 

Library is done besides final staging things too! (Ps. I hate those ceiling fans, but it isn't worth the head ache to replace them. My dream was to put a set of old fashion (looking) fans that ran with a belt between them!) 

HVAC ducts that have been installed!they run up from the basement through the mudroom. We have to build a closet to hide them. The HVAC has been the thing holding us up moving forward in the mudroom and the master bathroom. 

29 days to go, the paint sprayer

Immaybe a rare human, in the fact I like to paint. Painting rooms isn't something I fear or dislike. Well, recently it's getting a little boring. When I started to paint the woodwork in our master bedroom, I couldn't believe how long it took me to do just one window. So, the lure of a paint sprayer finally won me over. I spent a few days trying to figure out how I felt about using a paint sprayer.

From my experiences paint sprayers are for very specific jobs. 

DON'T buy a paint sprayer to paint a room to just freshen up the color. 

DO buy a paint sprayer to stain decks, fences, and other outdoor wood things.

DO buy a paint sprayer if you're going to paint anything large outside with latex paint, like the entire exterior of your house.

DON'T be cheap with taping things off when you use your paint sprayer. 

DON'T waste your money on a detail sprayer.

The best use for a paint sprayer indoors is for a house you're totally redoing, or is new construction and doesn't have floors and carpet you could ruin. Over spray is serious, very serious. Like, wear a mask/respirator, goggles, old clothes and a hat serious. Tape, paper and plastic everything you don't want paint on. Tape it so well you feel a little redundant doing so, because you'll still miss a tiny part and paint will sneak in somehow. If you're painting woodwork, a door, tape a lip that over laps the back side of the door around the whole door so over spray doesn't sneak in to cover your closet full of clothes. 

I didn't make a tape flap on the back of this door and should have and should have expended my tape and paper further under the door. That is unwanted over spray all over the floor leading from the bedroom to the hall. 

Over spray after math. I was totally covered. Shoes, hair, teeth, nose hairs, everything. 

Be prepared to use a lot of paint. There is a paint volume control setting on my sprayer and it still blasted through paint with alarming speed. 

Do your research on your sprayer to make sure you don't need to cut your paint. That just is a pain in the ass. But beware too you're sprayer may not be able to handle thick paint like paint plus primer or oil based paints. 

I used the sprayer to paint the woodwork in our master bedroom and some of the ceiling in the master bedroom.

Would I use the sprayer again for an indoor project ever again? likely not. 

Things I liked about the sprayer....

. It was relatively easy to clean. 

. Painting the woodwork was super fast compared to painting it by hand with a brush.

. Using it to paint the edge of the ceiling where it meets the wall, was a breeze. (Note, I didn't care about white ceiling paint over spraying to the walls. The time it would have taken me to tape, paper and plastic off the walls to avoid over spray would have been just as long as edging the ceiling by hand.

. About as loud as a blow dryer

. Relatively light weight

Things I did not like about the sprayer

. The time it takes to cover everything you don't want over spray to get on.

. The amount of paint that lingers in the air during and after spraying

. Lack of precision 

. The excess paint it used

I will love this thing if we ever need to paint the exterior of a house or need to stain a fence or deck. But for indoors a paint sprayer is a waste of your money for the mostly typical home owner. Good old fashion roller and edging brush is much more manageable, time saving and cost efficient compaired to a sprayer. The amount of time you save spraying a room is a joke compared to the amount of time you spend prepping the room to not get drizzled in over spray. 

I'll try and update later the brand and model we bought for sprayer. I know it's a Wagner that we bought from Home Depot. We got a kit with regular spray nozzle and a detail nozzle. The detail nozzle wasn't even used because it isn't recommended for paint plus primer paints and requires you to cut your paint to use it. Peggy is currently sleeping on my hand, it's been a difficult falling asleep night for her, so she can keep it all night if she needs. 

I hope this helps you realize you totally do or do not need a handheld paint sprayer in your life. 

Master bedroom before Rick slapped a quick coat of polyurethane on the floor. 

I am finally getting really sad to leave this house. I knew it would happen as rooms became finished. The house is becoming what I dreamt it to be and I will never get to live and enjoy it. 

32 days to go

So I quit counting what day we were on because I lost track and so now it's how many days u till our goal of putting our house on the market. June 1st. 

I think a lot has gone on since I last posted, or so I would like to believe. I'm waiting to go to target and half price books (date night) with Rick. He's currently swearing and deeming the fan we bought for the master bed room a piece of junk. When in reality it's probably something to do with the fact that we're wiring it to an electrician box we unburied from the ceiling. So, pause right here again, he just dragged me over to the fan. The wiring indeed works, he plugged light into it and it works but the fan will not work. So ricks theory of it being a piece of junk is currently in the running to be truth.

And now I'm off to find Peggy, or maybe me, the illustrated version of Harry Potter. 

Okay a whole day later I'm back.

Here are the things we have done since I last wrote...

.. Dinning room..

. Painted the border in the dinning room

. Painting the panels in the dinning room

. Put a second coat of bronze paint on the dinning room ceiling

. Cleaned most of the woodwork in the dinning room. Let me tell you that room is a real bitch to clean.

. Replaced the wall sconces 

  .. We still need to do in the dinning room..

. Replace a few missing parts of the wood paneling

. Add one more length of lights to light up around the border

. Replace the chandelier, whenever Amazon desires to deliver it. Come on Amazon, I pay to buy prime things to get them in two days not two weeks! 

. Paint the dinning room chairs. They're light wood colored and we're gonna paint them to be dark brown. They're cheap chairs and we don't want to buy new ones to make the room look nice for a photo. 

. Stage and take a picture

..2nd floor office.. 

. Patching the ceiling

..need to do..

. Paint the ceiling

. Clean the room

. Stage the room

..master bathroom..

. Ripped out all the flooring

. Got an HVAC guy who has gone missing to come give us a bid on installing new HVAC duct work for us. Looks like we're stuck doing it ourselves. Which makes me nervous. 

. Bought a claw foot tub

. Bought a vanity

.bought a shower floor pan

.got a quote and said okay to hiring a guy to make and tile a custom built shower in the bathroom

. Replaced a bunch of the sub floor in the bathroom that had gotten wet and rotted.

.pulled out all the nails in the walls from the lath

.installed lights

.need to do..

.backer board the floor

.tile the floor

. Green board the walls

. Bead board the walls

Install the vanity, and tub and toilet.

. Install a new ceiling

.new window and door trim

. Paint the doors

. Finish the shower

.. Master bedroom..

. Finished patching and smoothing the ceiling

. Painted the ceiling

. Painted the walls

. Painted the woodwork, which turned out to be a little bit of a struggle. 

. Scaped the Windows from over spray

. Installed a ceiling fan

..need to do..

Put the hardware back on the Windows 

. Install blinds

.hang curtains

.install a ceiling light

. Install a smoke detector

. Clean the floor

. Put a quick coat of polyurethane on the floor

. Hide a wire on the fire place

. Stage and take a picture 

..other random things we have been working on..

.fixing the built in glass and wood doors in the library

. Cleaning everything

. Planting plants on the second floor porch

.mowing our lawn all the damn time

. Ricks working on a grant

.were still trying to get Medicaid 

. Online house hunting 

. Cheering on the Penguins

I'll try to get a post up next about my experience with a paint sprayer. I know a few folks are curious if they're worth buying. For now I leave you with a few pictures of our lives right now. 

First floor, guest bathroom, aka "tiny bathroom" is done. I think I'll work on writing a blog post dedicated to each room and what it has gone through for each finished room. 

The almighty shower pan for the master bathroom. It feels so good to pay someone to tile it for us. 

Fact. I hate painting ceilings. They are the worst. I don't mind painting, it blows my mind that people pay people to paint for the, it's soooooo easy! But painting ceilings. I really hate. 

Master bedroom before

Master bedroom as of last night. 

Peggy, being Peggy.

This is Rick a few minutes ago. We keep it real classy watching the Penguins. (This is the guest bedroom right now.) 

Also, another post I'm not going to edit so sorry for typos!

Days 9 to 12

Posting has been lacking because there just hasn't been much to show and tell about. It's a lot of waiting for things to dry.

We've been working on the dinning room and fixing the plaster on the boarder around the top of the woodwork. Then we primed it and finally we painted the boarder and the panels. We tried to paint the boarder to be a faux gold leaf but it being so high up you couldn't even tell it was a metallic so we primed and painted it back to the yellow we picked out. 

The dinning room will be finished after we....

Paint a final coat on the ceiling

Touch up/clean the woodwork

Clear out the cob webs from the china cabinet

Replace the one missing handle on the China cabinet

Clean the room

Stage the room

The master bedroom... Has been the most paint or plaster and wait room. We have most of it primed. The ceiling seems to be ready to put up some kind of plaster decoration on to it. Getting that thing totally smooth is the biggest nightmare ever so we're gonna do some kind of knock down or swirlish kind of plaster pattern to make it look better than a not so flat ceiling. We also have most of the room primed and ready to paint

The master bedroom needs

The woodwork painted

The walls painted 

A ceiling fan installed

A baseboard that is missing replaced

A decorative piece of the window frame that is mmissing replaced

Likely a quick refinish of the floor

New blinds

Staged

The master bathroom has been the biggest of nightmares. It was originally a tiny bathroom, a water heater closet and a large handicap bathroom which we knocked down the walls to make it a huge master bathroom that connects to another room that could be a nursery or before Peggy came along we were going to turn it into a huge walk in closet. The three rooms had all kinds of different layers of floors on it. And each floor is glued, screwed or nailed in. One room had I kid you not seven different floors that we have had to rip up. We've spent the whole day ripping out a 7 by 10 foot floor(s).  There are so many nails in this stupid floor it's rediculous. I'll show a picture of a part of the floor we pulled up about two by two feet with just some of the nails still left in it. 

Tomorrow our beloved dumpster will part us! We first we felt like we over estimated the dumpster but we went around the house and purged everything we could from it and had a few neighbors toss some junk in and wah-la we filled that sucker up!

Tomorrow Rick and I take one of our last romantic dates to Saint Joseph Missouri. A short 40 minute drive north takes us to our hot date location of Menards! Our next favorite home improvement store besides Home Cheapo! ;) once we have the truck loaded up with all kinds of things from coat hooks, to a bathtub we will voyage to the other side of the highway and have a romantic lunch at Arby's.  What a romantic life we live in this money pit. 

In non-house news, Peggy has mastered rolling over from her back to her tummy. Tummy to back she's still working on. Peggy also has two bottom teeth that have fully broken through and making their way to sticking out like two little buck teeth. So cute. We are surviving Ricks mom for the most part! I gonna miss having someone to do my laundry that is for sure. 

For now, I leave you with some pictures of the house. 

This is about two by two feet part of the floor with maybe half of the nails in it still. Every single layer of the floor had nails put through it. 

Just more floor on floor on floor picture and my favorite gigantic huge crowbar. 

More bathroom floor picture. This little spot took us all day. 

Lastly a few day old picture of the dinning room. The yellows now match. I'll have a better picture up soon. 

Oh ps. I'm way to tired and sore to spell check and edit this post, so sorry if any of it was sloppy. I promise to take a lot of pictures tomorrow in the day light. 

Day 8

Day 8 feels like a totally wasted day. We're letting the curse of this house win. This house makes us feel so defeated so easily and today was one of those days where nothing seemed to go right.  

We mowed and weed whacked the yard. Got another layer of plaster on the master bedroom ceiling and then felt stuck. We can't do much in the master bedroom until the ceiling is done, that's the messy part.  Once the ceiling is done the rest of the room will move along quickly. The ceiling is a lot of waiting for things to dry. 

We went to Home Depot to check out some of the Ralph Lauren textured paint to see if it could be used for our ceiling, nope. But I did decide to accept a loss of money paid for fabric to wallpaper the panels in the dinning room and use the textured paint instead. Wayyyy faster. 

We need help. We are over whelmed. I think I finally convinced Rick to hire someone to do our dry wall.   The third person doing that will give the two of so much more time and energy to finish all the other things we need to work on. And by convinced I mean he probably won't divorce me when I call the people we have numbers that do dry wall to come give us quotes. 

I'm almost at a point of accepting we won't get what we want for this house and get it to a point where it's easy for the next owners to come in and finish it. Leaving the bathroom dry walled and backer boarded and ready for who ever to put whatever they want in it. 

In other off beat news about us. Henry our corgi is so stoked about our bedroom being in the sunroom. We didn't set up the bed frame and left the mattresses on the floor so the bed is at a height where he can jump up and snuggle with us. Henry heaven over here! Andddddd Peggy cut her first tooth today! Or atleast I discovered it today! 

Day 5, 6, & 7

As predicted, by Rick,  day five was a totally wasted day. We traveled to and from Lincoln Nebraska to pick up my new to me mom-mobile! Life with a baby and two dogs who seem to go everywhere with us wasn't quiet fitting so well in a Mini Cooper or a pick up truck! A few years of pointing and saying, "there's my car," "man wouldn't I look good in that car" paid off. 

Day 6 & 7

I forgot to take pictures day 6 and fell asleep typing the blog for it and what little I did write disappeared. Picture wise not much changed. We scraped off the wretched popcorn ceiling in the master bedroom day 6. If we didn't have to we would have left it. The ceiling in that room is pretty trashed. The group home had built a wall of closets jetting out about half way across the middle of the room. We took them and the sinks they also added to the bedroom out three years ago. So that alone left some serious cosmetic damage to the ceiling. Plus there were a lot of mysterious water damage stains and cracks along the plaster. Note, we have orginal plaster and lath ceilings. 

Getting rid of popcorn ceiling texture is pretty easy. You spray/mist it down with water and scrap it off. It's messy as hell but easy to remove. Like everything in the house, we uncovered a lot more than the few orginal problem spots in the ceiling. Tons of cracks and falling down plaster. We debated back and forth about what to do, Tear out all the ceiling and replace it, cover it up with fresh new ceiling sheet rock or leave it and patch it. Currently, leaving and patching is in the lead. Rick and I only momentarily came close to ending our marriage over this and have made some decent progress on this god damn ceiling. 

Today I realized that plaster makes for one hell of a dry shampoo. I'm not sure when the last time I took a shower was. I seemed to magically missed that moment of "seriously, I need to shower, pinning back my bangs and my hair still looks super gross." While I took a delightfully long shower plucking out little lice like balls of popcorn ceiling from my mangy mang I couldn't help but come up with a list of things I rather do than work on this house. It's amazing how fast our passion for this house has changed knowing we're not doing any of it for ourselves now. Even a big equity check isn't making it any easier. 

Right now I rather be eight months pregnant with twin boys for the next four months than working on this house. 

On a brighter side, we have four people waiting for us to let them in the house from our "make me move" post on Zillow and while scraping the popcorn off the ceiling we found an electoral box for a light in the middle of the room! This discovery saves us some time having to put one in ourselves. 

Oh! One last side note. If you ever get the itch to remove your popcorn ceilings be advised that popcorn ceilings put on before the 80s contains asbestos and scraping them yourself could be a very serious health risk.  

Oh and darling Richard, I made sure to post pictures with you in them knowing you would get mad I did. That's what happens when you're a cranky crank to me. I love you. :) 

Day 4

Holy cow, I'm kind of stoked I've posted four days in a row now! Ha!

Let's see here, day four. We got a DUMPSTER!

Rick spent most of the morning throwing junk we have collected into the dumpster. There is such a satisfying feeling you get throwing things out of the window of your house! He also spent a large part of the day huffing and puffing about how we need to quit farting around we don't have a lot of time. This is typical, "dumpster anxiety" for Rick. We only have ten days with our beloved dumpster. So, there is a little bit of a time crunch, but luckily this time we have very little house left to dump. 

Then we went on a dog walk. We take this time to reassess what is going on. We also make sure to exchange things we're grateful for each walk, I love that part of our walks. After the walk we walked into the house with determination. 

I finished moving all our junk we had in our bedroom into our new bedroom, the sun room. Our bedroom since Peggy was born has pretty much become our studio apartment. Bedroom, tv room, nursery, dog houses, cat hang out, bottle making station, clothing, craft supplies, it's rediculous. I took down the blinds and removed all the window hardware. While I was doing this Rick was working to rip out the last parts of the bathroom walls, handicap shower and floor, and thrust the remnants out the window. 

This is our master bathroom. What's rediculous is I can say it has mostly looked like this for over a year. We've been using our guest bathroom for pretty much the entire time we have lived in this house to shower and take baths. This makes me the most sad to move. We will someday soon have a finished master bathroom and I'll pretty much never get to enjoy it. 

Back tracking to me removing the hardware from the windows of our bedroom, we made the difficult decision to paint the wood work white in our bedroom. Before you throw your hands in the air and yell "why is gods name would you do that?!"  (If your an unpainter like me) we have our reasons. First, our wood work in our bedroom is actually painted right now. They painted it to look like a walnut colored wood. It tricked me for a while before I discovered it was painted. So my guilt is less, knowing I'm not the one slathering paint on to beautiful woodwork, someone else did, I'm just changing their color choice. Secondly, every room on the second and third floor already has painted white woodwork, why not just keep it all white. Third, the traditional excuse for painting woodwork white, "it brightens up the room" it's the truth. That room even with four Windows is dark and dingy. Lastly, I would be absolutely, positively, insane if I thought I could strip all of the wood back to the orginal wood and still have time to finished all the other crap we have to do in the house. We're trying to sell this house and make our money back in a few short months people! 

The current state of our master bedroom. It will have its wood work painted, the floor refinished, walls painted one color, new light fixtures installed along with a new ceiling. 

Dear old house, I'm sorry I whited your woodwork. For all I did for you, I hope house karma gods move someone in who will forgive me and have the patience to restore the second floor woodwork. 

It feels good to get into the swing of working on the house like crazy again. I'm so thankful Ricks mom is here to help be our nanny to Peggy. The time she is letting us have to work on this is worth all the mother in law, I want to strangle you moments. 

Tomorrow, in the words of darling Richard is going to be a, "totally wasted day."  We found my dream mom-mobile and have to go to Lincoln, Nebraska to pick it up. Which means, be prepared people, I might make some sort of horrifically tacky video dedicated to my beloved Mini Cooper and make sure the background music is that Sarah McLachlan song they play for abused and sad puppies commercial.