The not so blue room.

One of the best ways Rick and I have been able to tell each other which room we are talking about in our house is by the color of the room. Which, as I type this makes me think of my folks... they have a green room, blue room and a pink room. Ha. But, anyhoo, this is the progress of the not so blue, blue room!

If you click on the pictures, they will take you to an interactive panorama picture!

The "Blue Room" will be my room. Rick and I each have our own rooms to do whatever we want to do with. Basically our offices. Mine is my homework, computer and sewing room. This room is connected to a sunroom.

If you look to the back of the room, center of the picture you can see tall metal beams, in the first picture it looks like a blue wall with a door between, but there were skinny closets behind each wall. We knocked out the closets to give the room another three more feet. The closets seem to be installed as a, "why not" since they had a big air duct at the top of them. 

So long, closets and air duct! We had no problem with ripping out the air duct because it was there to lead into the garden room. By the time the air got to the garden room it was worthless. Which they must have quickly figured out since they installed one of those hotel sort of a/c and heat units under a window. 

This is the view of the room from the garden room, the door to the hallway is to your front left. 

As I began tearing down rotten, moldy, poorly installed drywall Rick was going behind me fixing the original plaster walls. (Please note the kick-ass, giant, handicap accessible bathroom, shower to the right in the picture! Second floor handicap bathroom, what?) As we made our way around we kept finding more and more problems. 

• Black mold!
• A huge drain pipe not flush behind a wall
• Rotten woodwork
• Cement and plaster walls falling apart
• Mismatched woodwork
• Old wiring with deteriorating fabric insulation

        All I wanted to do was rip off the chair rail that was on one wall only. That chair rail quickly snowballed into gutting the whole room! I'm pretty certain it would be easier to build a free standing room from scratch than going through and gutting the thing! I guess you can say we're half way though, we're putting new dry wall up tomorrow. I wanted to keep it all original plaster walls, but that's A LOT of work and time. Different layers of different thicknesses of different plasters with different curing/drying times plus trying to hang something into a solid plaster wall. Ha. So now, we will have fresh not moldy walls with fresh new woodwork without mega thick layers of white paint on it.

Works also in progress...

• Ricks office
• Third floor/ Master bathroom
• Drawing room

Modern Literature of Ping Pong

Since Rick and I are on a rather frugal and picky, thrift, craigslist, or estate sale kind of furniture shopping requirement for the house, finding furniture has been really slow going. A few grand spent at Nebraska Furniture Mart can be a few grand spent on dry wall, paint, electric wires, outlets, sand paper and so much more that the bones of our house need more than the eye of our guests.

After going out hunting for some thrift store furniture we came home with this.....

Our drawing room/library is one of the few rooms in the house that doesn't need much done to it. We're waiting out to pick out paint colors until we find some kind of showcase sort of piece of furniture, like a couch. So, until God drops a fantastic couch off on our front porch, this $20.00 ping-pong table will do just fine!

We have the room, and need something to do in between ripping out dry wall, laundry, and fighting off black mold. Plus, our oh, so glamorous camping chairs were crying for some company in this room. ha.

In other exciting news we have a plan for the floor! Yahoo! We were quoted $3 a square foot for refinishing our floors. You do the math for nearly 5000 square feet of floors. I wanted to cry. Not anymore! We're on a waiting list at Home Depot, oh our beloved Home Depot, to buy a used drum sander. With the help of some friends with past experience, and youtube we're going to redo our floors ourselves! AND-- save a TON of money! Plus having the opportunity to own our own sander will eliminate the pressure of trying to get all of the floors finished in so many days without having to pay more rental costs. We also know in the future when Rick and I sell our houses we rent out, we will need to refinish the floors too. Win-win. Rick is also convinced he can hire me out to sand other peoples floors, yeah.

Back to the grind of school work. All the snow days were great, but now all of the teachers are trying to catch up with the time missed, thus making our lives miserable.

oh! oh! I also scored a brand stinkin' new iMac!

So I no longer struggle to upload, and post and edit blogs via my phone or my kindle! 

I vow to try and figure out how to make interactive panorama pictures work on this blog!

Hola!

I finally found a blog app for my phone! Hello blog posts! My poor old old old Mac book is finicky and with out battery and usually lost in the house.

Right now I love my new full time job!

Being a homemaker. 

•I don't just cook, bake, clean and say sweet nothing's to Rick but I also rip out walls, put up dry wall, install new light fixtures and soon so much more!  

•our house is a wreck! I love it! We are in full blown house make over. The first month has been hard. Moving in, jobs, school, pets and becoming accustomed to the house and trying to find things all of the time. 

• I am so excited this Friday my mom, my sister Kate and her two kiddos Helen and Jack are coming to visit and spend the night!

•I've been having one heck of a time clothes shopping! Now I can buy anything! Before I pretty much only bought clothes that I could wear to work! From NASA t-shirt, to cool gap pants and a not tacky cat button up shirt! So good!

• I love love LOVE! Getting to leave the door open to the second floor balcony for the cats to come and go as they please!

• we finally pried open some windows! Fresh air!

I'm still trying to figure out how to get these sweet panorama pictures to work on my blog. But until then you can check out my picture line up!

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HERE!

The blue room we discovered was poorly dry walled so when we wanted to do just one wall it turned into a huge project! We found all sorts of black mold that had been covered up by the shotty dry wall job and rotting base boards. So we've decided to gut it! We're restoring the original plaster and cement walls. So long dry wall! 

Don't worry we have masks gloves eye wear, bleach and sprint for the shower after each mold exposure. This is about 1:50 of what we cleared out. 

 

Another picture you will see is our other major project. The third floor bathroom. This bathroom we plan to expand and put in a lavish master bathroom. Well maybe no lavish, I just really wanted to use that word. This bathroom was a nightmare from the get go. I think all the water and rain damage helped wars off prospective buyers.  This one is going to be a lot of fun to watch transform!

Off to sleep! I'm currently reading Upton sinclairs -The Jungle. 

Have you read it? If not get your butt to half price books and buy it and read it. I can't stop thinking about it. Wow. 

busy, busy, busy

The last few weeks have been crazy!
School has kept me super busy and sort of sad because i want to work on the house!

this is a short and sweet post! I'll be back soon with fun  pictures and stories!

• all of our appliances suck, besides the fridge, which we bought new  
• every project even as small as replacing a light fixture turns into a much larger project  
• our neighbors are twilight zone friendly, kick ass when you get used to it
• we found black mold
• i stepped on a nail, right into the bend of my big toe. ouch..
• we have decided to knock out all the walls we need to at one time, easier to get rid of all the debris
• and i only have 23 credits until i get an associates and move to UMKC in the spring!
• and we're collecting addresses for wedding invites!