Colors!! We picked Colors! (well.. maybe just one..)

Boom!  If that's not a delicious blend of colors and patterns I don't know what is..

 

Wallpaper for the dining room and some colors for the rest of the house

 

To those of you who may have noticed a bit of a dry spell in regards to blog posts...  We're sorry!  We've been trying to enjoy summer as much as possible.   In between the flood, gas leak scare (yes, another one) and general house projects we haven't completed many exciting projects as of late. 

Fireplace Fun

Since we got rid of the wood stoves it was logical to get a Masonry Contractor over to quote some work and sweep the chimney.  When the contractor pulled the flange/hook up thing from the flue we were greated with THIS 

Yeah... that's what happens when you don't know how to work a wood stove and you burn cords and cords of wood and never have your chimney swept.....  Gross... and Dangerous!   Things got more interesting though....

This is what renovation looks like.

So by now, I think the overall public opinion is "wow, you guys are working so hard and your home will be beautiful!!" Is that about right?  I bet some of you are even thinking about starting a project of your own, or maybe wishing you'd tried this when you were young and full of spit and vinegar.  Well, let me tell you a few things.  It ain't easy and it ain't pretty.  (It is fun, I won't even lie.)

We've been sugar-coating it for you.  I hate to admit it, but this blog is all about romance and dreaming and you'd better be warned before doing anything like this.  If you can't handle it, please step away from the browser window.  I am about to show you unfiltered, unstaged, uncensored view of life in a renovation.  I came home, fed/walked the dog and then took snapshots of everything as I walked through.

This is what it actually looks like.

We gave the house a haircut!

Hi everybody!

Once again, Emilio and I have been super-busy on a project that probably makes our neighbors wonder if we've lost our minds.  

You may remember the exterior of the house looking something like this:

Gas leak, living room update, paint stripping!

Wow, who knew that working on a home renovation by yourself is actually really hard?  With Emilio coming and going for business trips (way to bring home the bacon, hon!) I have been starting and abandoning projects all over the place.   So far, the house still stands.

So much done... So little to show

Its amazing. The first few weeks it felt like every little thing was a huge improvement and you feel like you're making tons of progress. Then... you get to the point where you spend 2 hours turning this:

We put the "no vacation" in renovation...

 Hi there, Becky here again.

Another productive and exhausting weekend is behind us and I think we're both starting to appreciate Mondays as restful back-to-the-office days!

Emilio already posted a bit about the progress we made, but while he was working on all that stuff, Sully and I had our own agenda.


First off, hiking in the woods.  I've found a nice little dog park near the house and they have trails through the forest where people look the other way on the whole local leash law thing.  So, luckily, the weekend started with Sully getting nice and tired.  Oh, and MUDDY.  Did I mention muddy?  So, the second thing on the list for Saturday wound up being bath-time for Sullivan.

Then, to work!

Honey, I think I blew up the Dining Room!

Wallpaper

It seems like such a great design decision at the time. Then you paint over it.. Or maybe paper over it.. Then you sell the house to some guy named Emilio and laugh as you drive away.  

I like wallpaper, I really do.  I just don't like tar covered 1930s wallpaper that was painted over.  Or horrible plate rails that aren't really plate rails (they have grooves...for you know...plates) but actually two pieces of base moulding that were tacked together and slapped up onto the wall of my dining room right at eye level such that it makes the room feel shorter than it is and makes the giant dining room windows look funny.  

So I did what anyone else would do.   I TORE IT ALL OUT IN A FIT OF RAGE!!!  Well.. what really happened was that Becky and I went to the Serv-U Locksmiths over in Springfield to get some copies of the skeleton keys we have (the only keys we have for the house) made.  While there we met their "wallpaper guy" who upon learning of our desire to remove wallpaper from plaster walls informed us to go against all commonly given advice and not use wallpaper remover or water or anything like that but to instead dry scrape it with a wall stripper he had, basically a 4in razorblade on a handle).  

We got home new toys in hand and this happened... 

Carpet.. Carpet... Oh god the carpet! Oh yeah... and a bathroom.

I hate carpet.  I could just leave it at that but I really think you should understand why I hate carpet.  I hate carpet because I have horrible allergies.  Steam heat was a definite "want" when searching for homes.  Forced hot air is awesome... if you want to blow dirt around your house like a weirdo.  That said I was torn between being absolutely disgusted by the carpet we removed from the house and being elated by the fact that I was looking at wood floors.  

It wasn't as quick of a process as we expected though.  In the last blog I showed the process for removing the carpet from the stairs and the living room.  That took us most of a weekend.  The rest of what I'm documenting here took another week from start to finish, finish being getting the rolls of carpet and padding into the garage.  During this time we also made the bathroom usable as we started camping out at the house during the week/weekend.  

It's mine! Let's tear it apart!

I don't know what it is about going into 30 years of debt but it seems to drive people to do strange things.... Like tear apart the house they just bought.

  

First things first though... lets get rid of that stupid sign out front!