08Sep

Real Rooms. An Update on the Bedroom and Office/Guest Room

I’ve been waiting to write this. Waiting until I got both rooms clean so I could take some decent pictures and not show the internet how terribly messy we get sometimes. Fuck it. We’re messy, and I’m okay with it. For the record, this is not gross messy. I don’t leave dirty dishes hanging out, I wash my sheets, and even vacuum on a (mostly) regular basis. It’s busy messy. It’s ‘two-hundred-thirty-seven projects going on at once’ messy. It’s ‘we haven’t finished the house and have very little storage space because most of the cabinets are missing’ messy. It may also be related to the fact that I’m almost constantly nauseous and never stop wanting to take a nap (twelve weeks pregnant folks, time is flying).

Please keep in mind that these rooms are not finished, just livable. We still have a hundred things to do in them including trim, outlet covers, and hanging our art on the walls. They are far from perfect, but compared to having a “living room” that’s a combination living room, dining room, office, and bedroom…it’s amazing. Now we have an actual bedroom. Then an office that’s an office/living room/dining room. Progress is progress. I am completely smitten with the fact that I now have a bedroom. It seems like a silly thing, until you don’t have one. Want a peek?

Progress of My “Test Room”

Before you get too excited, this room is far from finished. BUT, I have finished the walls (with the exception of a couple minor paint touch ups). I chose the second bedroom as a test room so I could make sure I could adequately fix the destroyed drywall and not have it look like a total hack job. Now that I’m pleased enough with the results I get to move onto fixing the walls on the rest of the house! Here is my test room, from beginning to now.

I know I’ve posted this picture before, but what’s a result picture without a before? This is what I started with in our second bedroom.

Another repeat from a previous post, but this was the “during” phase – after I had removed most of the wood paneling.

No more blue carpet! In order to salvage the drywall I had to take a razor blade and cut around most of the rips and tears to provide clean edges to work with. The wall on the right had the cutting finished, and was then primed with an oil based primer (which I will forever and always despise) to re-seal the drywall and prevent the joint compound from soaking in an wrecking the final product.

I may have been extremely busy and frustrated and completely neglected to take pictures after I had applied the joint compound to fill in the tears. I also skipped pictures of sanding said joint compound. I promise I’ll try to do better with the next room. This was after the cutting, priming, joint compound, sanding, and – after texturing. I have never textured drywall before, I don’t think I had ever even seen a hopper gun. The texturing is definitely not perfect, but it’s mostly consistent.

Texture close-up!

Another instance of me skipping pictures. This is after the room was primed over the texture, but also after I started testing out colors. I may have been a little over excited to start with some actual colors!

I painted! The color here a shade lighter than the bottom sample color on the wall from beforehand, I decided that the first samples were too dark. The whole point was to modernize the room and add some brightness, I think choosing a color that was too dark would have totally wrecked that. This is Behr April Mist, and is so much nicer in person than it is in the picture. The lighting here made it seem too pastel, it’s bright but not overly pastel or girly.

Next step is moving onto fix the walls in the master bedroom. Once I have that completed (I’m already ready to add joint compound in there!) we will be installing carpets in both bedrooms. After carpet we are moving our existence into the bedrooms instead of the living room and then getting started on the main areas of the house.

I am trying to get my ass in gear so I can have this (mostly) done before the wedding in July. I also need to make adequate progress so I can not stress about the house while I’m out of town for IVF in June – way more on that later.

So there it is, my mostly complete test room with the walls that I managed to mostly salvage. Even though it took me ages to get done, I am ridiculously proud of myself and my new drywall skills.

10Mar

Reasons for the lack of house updates, and why I am not excited about the warmer weather.

Last week I may have promised an update on the main living sections of the house. I definitely intended to take my after pictures and show the wonderful, but messy, results we have so far. However, shit happened (as it usually does).

The weather finally started to warm up a bit, and I had about five minutes to enjoy the above freezing temperatures before the flooding starting. Thursday night I was curled up reading a book when Casey got home and went out to the shop to unload the truck. Two minutes later he is back inside, telling me to get my shoes on and come help him because the shop is flooding. Fan-fucking-tastic. While the house is in this demo phase we have just about all of our furniture hanging out in the front corner of the shop: couches, bookshelves, tables, chairs, boxes, about 3/4 of the crap we own. I will give you three guesses as to which corner of the shop was flooding (which is very generous of me considering there are only four corners). If you guessed the corner with all of our furniture, you would be correct. We spent the next hour or two moving everything to the middle of the shop and trying our best to remove the water. I was a little to busy trying to save my couch to take a before picture, so this is all I got:

I know, not a huge flood, but when we started we had a good three inches or so of water in that back corner. After we got the shop mostly under control we decided it would probably be a good idea to check the crawl space for flooding. It was.

We attempted to solve this by hooking a garden hose to the shop vac. We managed to fill the 10 gallon vacuum five or six times over an hour or so, and gave up when the water had barely moved an inch. I did try and buy a sump pump, but pretty much everywhere was sold out or only had super industrial $200 ones left. Good news: Casey’s brother saved the day by bringing us an extra sump pump he had on hand, and all of the water was cleared out in about 10 minutes.

Most of these flooding issues can be attributed to the terrible grading on our property and the huge amount of snow that inconveniently dumps off of the roof right next to house to melt into the foundation. Here are some pictures of the snow dump.

All of that needs to be shoveled away from the house to prevent the crawl space from totally flooding. My arms feel like they are going to fall off, and we’ve barely made a dent.

I don’t have any pictures of the driveway, which cause me some big problems on Saturday. Our house is down a communal driveway with 3 or 4 houses, and it’s slanted down from the road. Our personal driveway is slanted down from the communal driveway. For those of you that haven’t guessed, this means that all of the snow melt from the road, communal driveway, and our driveway flows right into the shop – which is apparently the low point in the driveway. I was attending to the shop while Casey was at work on Saturday, and even after I had sand bags across the front of the shop the water was flowing in faster than I could suck it up. I ended up spending a couple hours digging trenches in solid ice to divert the water, first away from the shop to solve the immediate problem and then later across the communal driveway to divert the water into the front yard instead of the driveway. Pictures probably would have made that a little more understandable, but I managed to get busy enough to completely forget about taking pictures.

Long story short, this property is terribly designed and we have a serious snow melt issue. I still have more snow to shovel than I would like to admit, but it seems that we have the main problem areas under control for now. I will get around to posting updates on the inside of the house after the snow shoveling is done. I hate shoveling snow.

03Mar

Bedroom Wood Paneling and Demolition

I may have gotten a little caught up with house stuff and a little behind on the blog stuff. Here are some (not so fantastic) before and after pictures of what we’ve been up to – which is mostly ripping off wood paneling and some minor demolition of cabinets. Please ignore any glimpse of my messy house, we’ve been living in a construction zone. Also, that fuzzy mutt in (almost) every picture would be Faye, she likes to watch me work.

This would be the before all of the wood paneling in the blue room, I used a panoramic to get it all in so the room looks a bit skewed.

Blue room after – it already looks so much brighter! Yes, I know I missed a panel, I was having some minor electrical issues with the thermostat that was on that panel (and by issues I mean I had no clue how to disconnect it and had to wait for Casey to get home to help).

Yellow room before. This picture was taken after we ripped out the bed frame, that was built in before they installed carpet. The frame was too big for me to move by myself, so it’s still hanging out in the room until we get some extra man power.

Yellow room after, another instance of me not knowing how to disconnect the thermostat. For the record, I can now disconnect and reconnect the thermostats all by myself.

This is the built in cabinet that was in the yellow room. The doors/fronts were taken off when we had the asbestos removed from the ceilings. Similar to the bed frame, this was completely built in. Nailed to the walls and floor, and a true pain in the ass to rip out.

This might not be the best after picture with all of the bed frame components stacked against those walls, but it’s the best I have for now.

There you have it! I’ll be posting again this week with the before and after wood paneling pictures from the dining room and living room, and some before and after of the living room demolition. I’ll bitch about the damage to the dry wall, and how we plan to (hopefully) fix it later.

22Jan

Home Sweet Home

We moved to Montana! We might have moved in September, but now officially own a house. After almost four months of living in a tiny apartment I am beyond excited to start making the new house our home. This is it, home sweet home.

Home Sweet Home

Completely outdated, but the only picture I have right now of the exterior of the house. Also, a much better picture than the current snow covered…everything. Actually, all of these pictures are outdated. We might have forgotten to take before pictures before beginning some projects, so unfortunately these are the best “before” pictures I have. Before we even moved in, with the previous owners stuff in the house. Better than nothing though! Welcome to our new home, here’s the tour.

Backyard! This would be the (not snowy) view into the backyard from the back door of the house.

: Backyard…Again. Same backyard, different view. Looking at the house. Please ignore the piles of junk, those would be from when the previous owners lived here.

Living Room. Carpet and cabinets. Sums up a lot of the house.

Oh, and wood paneling. Everywhere.

Not entirely sure why all the appliances were shoved together on one wall, but I am loving the space (compared to the closet of a kitchen at the apartment we were in).

: “Master” Bedroom. Not technically a master yet, but it will be. For the record that bed frame was completely built in. Demolition pictures to come.

Someone loved cabinets.

The Blue Room. Aka the second bedroom. But check that carpet! Hence, the blue room.