White Out

The main thing on our agenda this weekend is priming. My dad volunteered to prime the ceilings. We're still not sure if it's because he's the tallest, or he thinks my mom and I would drip primer all over the floors. But regardless, we're very thankful he is doing the ceilings because it does not look like a fun job! He primed the ceilings in 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, and the hallway. My mom has been painting all of the closet shelves to round out the wonderful job she did painting the inside of the closets.

After peeling really old contact paper off of the 4 shelves of this built in cabinet, I primed the inside and outside of the cabinet.

Then I primed the hallway walls while my mom was cleaning and prepping the front room. At the end of the weekend, we all pitched in to quickly prime the very large front room.

Hmm, it seems like most of the pictures are of things I primed. But it's hard to take pictures of the ceilings...and I forgot to take a picture of the front room!

Framed

This weekend my contractor is working on framing in the doorways to the kitchen and re-working the wall to accommodate the kitchen plans.

Soon he will begin hanging sheet rock, and then we will be able to start assembling the kitchen! His workers have been working on the 4th bedroom to prepare it for all of the activity that will soon begin on it. There are several things that need to be done - roof work, structural/foundation work, adding heating and air conditioning, replacing a broken in sliding glass door, and some work on the bathroom - so I am having them enlarge the bedroom a bit while they are at it. The house doesn't really have a master bed/bath, so this bed/bath will turn into one. They are also going to turn the old kitchenette into a laundry room...because I don't really want my washer and dryer in the kitchen : )

Insulation and Volunteer Painters

Imagine what happens to your utility bills when you don't have any insulation in your attic for a few weeks, your chimney damper is broken, most of your windows are circa 1960, some of your windows have broken panes covered with boards or plastic bags, and the low every night for the month is below or close to freezing. Imagine how glad I was to see a crew at my house this morning blowing insulation into the attic!

While they were blowing in the insulation, it was actually even colder in my house because they had to keep the front door open to run the insulation hose up the yard, into the house, down the hall, and up the attic stairs.

But they were really fast, and soon I was able to close the doors and start warming the house back up. Luckily it warmed up quickly since some people were coming over to paint! Donna, Rally Foundation Operations Coordinator extraordinaire, volunteered to spend a day at my house painting! She and her daughter Sarah came and painted the 2nd coat of paint on 3 bedrooms in record time.

They did a fantastic job and the bedrooms look great! I painted the louvered closet doors while they painted the bedrooms until I had to go to work. They were wonderful enough to stay and finish painting even after I had to leave!

A Room with a View

Today my contractor, Bob, and his workers took up the 2 layers of vinyl floor in the kitchen and took out the bar area.

They will soon start closing up some of the doorways to the kitchen and putting up new insulation and sheet rock.

My dad replaced the big window next to the fireplace along with some assistance from his 4 legged friend. (Please excuse the huge mess of tools and painting supplies.)

When we got home tonight, we discovered that Tux had gotten a little too close to some of the projects we worked on today. It turns out he has turned into a skunk!

What Wallpaper?

The Jack and Jill bathroom has this handy built in cupboard. The cupboard has this hideous built in wallpaper.

Not anymore! I scraped off the wallpaper - being very thankful that the entire bathroom wasn't covered in wallpaper - and primed and painted the cabinet.

Now that looks like some place I'd want to keep my toothbrush!

My wonderful mom primed 5 closets and put 2 coats of paint on each one this weekend! The pictures of the insides of the closets don't do her work justice, so just imagine that the closets are as bright and shiny as the bathroom cupboard : )

Before and After...A Little After the Fact

Here are a few Before & After pictures from last weekend. As you can see, we went through quite a lot of primer and paint!

Can you believe the difference?!

Spotless Bathroom

Remember the bathroom with the extremely bright colored polka dots all over the walls? Well we took the medicine cabinet and the large mirror off of the wall to start priming over the polka dots, and this is what we found behind the mirror...

...a large section of lovely wallpaper. Even more interesting than the wallpaper was the large section of masking tape in the middle. We peeled back the masking tape to find that it was "patching" a large hole in the wall!

I think we're going to just cut out the entire wall paper section and put in new sheet rock, since we have to patch that hole anyway! We need to do some electrical work on this wall anyway, so maybe the hole isn't such a bad thing after all? I decided to prime around the wallpaper for now, and after THREE coats of high quality primer, the walls are now spotless!

Waterproofing

The membrane is up on the basement walls, and the moat is about to be filled with concrete!

Weatherproofing

My house came with a digital thermostat, but it wasn't programmable and it never seemed to register a logical temperature. Turning it up or down had little affect on the temperature inside the house. As you can see, when my dad installed the new thermostat, it had a little catching up to do in order to get the temperature up to a reasonable level!

My dad and William did a great job of taping and mudding the new sheet rock in the garage to keep the cold weather out!

I love the windows that my dad found at Builder's Surplus and all the light they let in the garage. Who knew he was such a designer?

White Washed: Before and After

Before

After (drop cloth covering the hardwoods)

Before

After (still have to get the wallpaper off)

Before

After

Prime Time

After weeks of scrubbing the walls with chlorox, filling a million dents and holes with putty and plaster of paris, and sanding the walls, we were finally ready to start priming today.

My dad took the chair rail off the mural room to discover the remains of old wall paper underneath. You can see how excited he is about this latest discovery : )

Here's a shot of the newly discovered chair rail made out of old wall paper.

Does anyone know why you would put up wallpaper, put up chair rail, take down the wallpaper, and paint a giant mural taking up all 4 walls??

The Moat at My Castle

How do you keep water from getting into your basement every time it rains? Build a moat! My contractor and his workers took jack hammers to the concrete floor in the basement and dug out a moat. Today they filled it with gravel, and a waterproofer will come install a waterproof membrane soon before they close the moat in with concrete. (Some people might refer to this moat as a French drain.)

They also dug out the built in sump pump and filled in the hole with concrete. I know you wish you had sitting a sump pump sitting in the middle of your basement floor!

Garage "Wall" to Garage Wall

After the old exterior "wall" was demolished

I guess I don't have any pictures of the old garage wall because there weren't any functional lights out there at the time. But picture a carport that someone did an extremely poor job of turning into a garage. The exterior garage "wall" had rotted away and the insulation was scattered on the floor, and critters with long tails could crawl easily through the "wall". Now it is a properly-built wall complete with sheet rock and windows!

Inside

Outside

Sledgehammers and Skating Rinks

The advantage of having a paved basketball court in your backyard is that when it snows, the basketball court turns into an ice skating rink! Tux and Scout spent the day running around in the snow while we spent the day doing demo inside. (Note: there are no pictures of Scout because she does not let us take her picture! The second you take the camera out of the case, she runs off and hides. I have even tried my camera phone, but she is too smart!)

My mom and I took out the sheet rock in the kitchen because it was in really bad shape and there was no insulation behind it on the exterior walls.

My dad put in a total of 5 windows over the snowy weekend, and helped get the higher up sheet rock pieces that my mom and I couldn't reach. He was not interested in having his picture taken next to the recently installed windows : ( I guess he wants to remain anonymous in blogland.

Snow Day

Before (broken out window boarded up by HUD)

After (brand new Energy Star window with a better view)

It snowed last night in Atlanta, and there is 1/2 inch of snow and ice on the ground. School is closed, and no one is driving anywhere because the roads are really bad. My dad, however, had been planning to replace windows in my house today since before Christmas, and was determined to do so in spite of the snow. He drove his 4 wheel drive SUV over to my house before any of us woke up, and spent the day replacing windows by himself. When I told him he was crazy and it was too cold (high of 24 degrees!), he replied, "It's a great day to do indoor projects!" I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that when you start taking out windows, it is no longer considered an indoor job! Especially since there is no insulation in my attic right now, and the highest the indoor thermostat read all day was 60!

Time Out

Between the holidays, being sick, and exceptionally cold weather, not much visible progress has been made on my house lately. I've been working with kitchen designers and making plenty of trips to Home Depot, Lowe's, tile stores, etc and working on plans for cosmetic things for the moment. Tux is hoping the weather warms up soon so he can take off this scarf!