Sunday, August 17, 2008

Crazy Work Weekend

If working on the house was an olympic event, I think we would have at least won a silver this weekend :)

BEFORE:



Friday: My mom and I drove to Nashville to Lumber Liquidators to pick up bamboo flooring. Friday evening was taking apart the cabinets, and Michael creating his awesome paneling!



The beautiful view from our front porch.


The super scary light "fixture" in our kitchen. The third fixture we've found to be burnt and black inside.



Saturday: Michael finished his paneling, adjusted the cabinets to fit the fridge and the over-the-range microwave we bought LAST YEAR. We didn't think we would be able to get it in until we did a full reno of the kitchen, but our mini reno is turning out amazing! Mom spent the day priming the cabinets with the excellent multipurpose primer which didn't require stripping of the cabinets, yay! (Thanks Mom!) I spent the day priming and painting.












Sunday: Michael installed almost all of the bamboo flooring, it's beautiful! Mom painted the cabinets, awesome! And I finished priming the foyer and spare bedroom, and began painting. I love the colors so far!










"Scottish Shortbread", beautiful color!!



Now to attempt to postpone the appraisal for one week :)

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Quick Kitchen Update

Our friends came over to help today, which was amazing!! We got a lot done, and one of the most exciting things was to remove and move some of our cabinets to fit the fridge where it is supposed to go. It looks great and the kitchen feels so much bigger!

Thanks Monica and Kyle!



 
 
Kyle enjoying all the empty space in the kitchen.
 
Michael making burgers.
 
Monica cleaning the gunk off the fireplace, it looks great!Posted by Picasa

Appraisal is coming soon!




Yikes! We are working really hard this weekend to knock out some projects to improve our appraisal. We went to the bank last week & applied for permanent financing, we've had a construction loan up to now. Now we are working and waiting for the appraiser to call us this week to schedule the appraisal.

I have been making good progress in the spare room, and the foyer is looking MUCH better. Yesterday I worked on mudding the spare room and Michael installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom and dining room. It is so exciting to finally have a light in the dining room! And although I've never been a fan of ceiling fans (ha!), now that we are living with almost no a/c in August in Kentucky, I have a new appreciation. It's so much quieter than the fan we were moving from room to room before.

We've had an eventful couple of months at the house since I last posted. We had a limb from one of our trees, the size of a regular tree, fall on our house during a wind storm. Which luckily did not do severe damage, but was not cheap. And then we had our second major plumbing disaster. Which involved sewage backing up into the cellar. But we now have 100% new plumbing from the water main to the sewer.

Here is the tree, and now that the limb is gone you can actually really see the front of our house for the first time, although you still can't see it from the street with all the other trees:







Here is some of my progress on the spare room, I swear they used super glue or something to put the wallpaper on, it took forever to get it all off and damaged the walls. I have been putting on a skim coat of mud to smooth it all out, which is turning out pretty well:








The foyer is looking great now that it has been cleared out and clean up. We're still trying to get the wallpaper off there too!




And here are Rosie and Charley. Michael says that Charley is his helper because she follows him around when he's working.




And ceiling fans!



Michael's little helper :)