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. 

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.