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. 

 

Day 3

Oh, day three. Day three, you've quickly lead me to believe to give up expecting to get what I think we should get done, done. 

 First, we started in the garage. We moved things around to set up a holding place for packed moving boxes, furniture we want to keep but don't want to use to stage. While we did this we posted some things for sale online. We did pretty good. We made $75 today! 

Then we had a little bit of a lull in the afternoon we walked the dogs and my friend Nora came over to visit Peggy and I and talk gardening.

After our little break, we began cleaning up the sunroom to move our bedroom into it. We took down all the broken blinds, swept, mopped, and relocated all the junk that had piled up in it. As a side note, my favorite part about moving is finally having the best excuse to get rid of all the junk we have accumulated. Then I suddenly had a horrible pain in my lower right abdomen. Hell if I know or ever will know what it was. I usually get a similar pain on my left side and has always associated it with various lady pains. This pain nearly convinced me to go to the ER. I didn't have a fever and God only knows what the hell is going on with our Medicaid status so I waited it out. After a few hours of being curled up in bed we were back in business.

During the time of me being under the weather I have no idea what happened around the house. I think ricks mom did laundry and Rick went around plastering cracks, holes and dents. 

We managed to move a lot of our bedroom into the sunroom. We're actually thinking of leaving our bedroom set up in here, but that could just be a fleeting feelingd. It's connected to the nursery and master bedroom and we would then turn the master bedroom into the tv/living room. Our bed room has forever shared being the tv room and bedroom. It's big enough to hold a couch and our bedroom stuff. 

We moved our bedroom because the bedroom needs some messy work along with the master bathroom. Our master bedroom has the best window access to throwing things out to the dumpster. Which! I forgot to mention! Our fourth and final dumpster is coming in the morning! I just asked Rick how many dumpsters we were up to and he told me so far we've gotten rid of 14,000 pounds from our house just in dumpsters. THAT'S SO MUCH PLASTER! So the next ten days we run around trying to knock out any last bit of walls and floors we need to fill up the dumpster! 

Here's a glimpse to our room for sleeping in. Peggy says hi! We won't put our bed frame together until we know where it's going to be for staging. We also are ordering new blinds for this room too, so we won't be on display to all of our neighbors. 13 sets of blinds, yuck that's going to suck buying and then hanging them all up. Eventually we will paint the walls of this room and sand and refinish the floor. 

Tomorrow should be one hell of an update! Nothing gets us more excited than an empty dumpster to fill! Oye, we're so lame! 

Day two

Hola!

Day two has been pretty uneventful. For me it quickly felt like we reached defeat. I think that feeling comes on the heels of Rick and I having a competition to see who can lose the most weight during this. So I'm fighting every urge to eat sugar and bread. If any of you know me, I live off of candy and carbs. So cutting out sugar and carbs and being delightfully sleep deprived (thanks to my sweet 4 month old Peggy!) I spent most of my day pouting about how we're never going to do this. 

I forgot to take pictures! So this is a lame post. Sorry!

Today we, finished the quarter rounds in the carriage house, worked on a few small things in the carriage house, sanded some of the entry way walls, primed the tiny bathroom ceiling/walls, painted the vestibule, went grocery shopping, and walked the dogs twice.

We also decided to change up our game plan on what we're going to conquer first. 

Day 1

Many of you might know already, but we're moving to Delaware this summer. Rick got an awesome director position at The University of Delaware. We need to be there August first so it's crazy crunch time for us to finish fixing up the manor and getting it ready to sell and try to make some money from all the work we've put into it. Soo... Thanks to some of you folks that read my blog, I'm gonna try and document this craziness!

day one.

Grandma Suminski has arrived. We decided a plane ticket for a month visit from grandma was our cheapest bet to help us have a nanny for Peggy while Rick and I run around like headless chickens. We're super grateful she's here to help, but holy cow this lady is in a league of her own. (This is where I insert a bunch of wide eyed teeth gritting emojis) 

First and foremost, I feel obligated to explain we have been living in paycheck limbo for about ten months. we came to a screeching stop for working on our house. Being uncertain if we could dip into our savings to fix the house and me being pregnant added to the major slow down of progress. We've been living in a ghost of a project unfinished throughout our entire house. Kitchen cabinets missing knobs, walls half dry walled, bathrooms mostly gutted, HVAC vents and tubes lying around, we've grown completely accustomed to this squalor. 

I'm going to try my damnest to post every night. I'm hoping it will keep me extra motivated to work my ass off. Right now,  I, and I don't doubt Rick too, are ready to give up. Don't say, "why don't you just sell it as is?" We will if we get the right offer on it, but right now the house is in shambles and will scare off most anyone semi interested in buying it and we're trying to walk away with some equity in our pocket for a downpayment for our next house. 

Today started off late. Grandma arrived late morning and we didn't get going untill around two. We finished putting the floor in the carriage house, started putting in the quarter rounds in the carriage house, mowed our lawn, edged and trim our yard, went to Home Depot and Costco, plastered and sanded the tiny bathroom ceiling and primed the vestibule. 

I realized today that I'm likely going to have to explain myself to my new neighbors in Delaware that my lawn mower is painted hot pink glitter because it would be easier to find if stolen and sold to a pawn shop. I can't ever imagine my lawn mower being stolen in our next home. (Yahoo!) 

Carriage house got it's nasty carpet ripped out and replaced with a wood floor! It's really oak and not laminate! 

Hardest little nook of our house to take a picture of, the vestibule. All primed and ready to paint.