This weekend was full of work on the house. I won’t go into great detail on everything we did because this blog post would be too long, so I’ll focus on the most exciting part — the family room. The slide show shows the installation of our flooring this weekend! It is a room again!
First, Glen installed our granite hearth. Of course, nothing in our house is level or straight, so to get the granite to lay right he had to chisel away parts of the brick fireplace.
After he installed the hearth, Glen prepped the room with padding. By the time he was finished, the hubby came home from work. So, the two of them laid down our laminate flooring. They even started putting up molding around the baseboards and the windows on Saturday!
Today they are both working on a built-in TV cabinet. I can’t wait to see what it looks like when I get home from work!
So after a long weekend of painting, my right hand hurts unbelievably badly. I even woke up in the middle of the night because it hurt so bad. But, that didn’t stop me from doing one final coat on my master bedroom last night at 8 p.m.
Yes, 8 p.m. That was not our original plan last night, but Lowe’s took a little longer to retrieve our flooring from the back of the store than we expected. So the painting began at 8 p.m. Let me just say that I was the most efficient painter last night. I cut in my ceilings and baseboards on a single wall, then painted it with the roller. Repeat for three more walls, and you have a slate gray room painted in an hour and a half! Whew!
I removed the tape and cleaned up the drop cloth, so now all we have left to do is replace the outlet covers.
*Sigh of relief* I’m finished painting until we move in. We have our electrician coming on Thursday, and I don’t want to paint the living and dining rooms in case he has to cut out holes in the wall to move things around. Also, I am just tired of painting.
While I painted, the hubby unloaded our 28 boxes of laminate flooring.
That’s a lot of flooring. It will look a lot better than the yucky tiles down there now. Also, that is one quality iPhone picture haha.
We also taped out a rough idea for a shelving unit behind our bar. The outer columns will be storage for wine bottles, and the inner column will be for liquor. We’ll see what Glen thinks about our design.
Tonight we are actually NOT going to our new house. Instead, we’re checking out Great Gatherings in Annapolis to see if we like a bar there. I’m loving this one:
It comes in a nice dark wood as well, and even has space for a mini fridge. I have to say that I am super excited to go shopping, to not be painting, and to not have to make the trek to work, to our rental, to our home, then back to our rental again. I swear it gets longer each time! All of our hard work is totally worth it though. I can’t wait to actually move into our new home this weekend! We get our fridge, dryer and microwave on Saturday, and we’re using a Re/Max moving truck on Sunday to move the rest of our stuff! Woo!! We moved a little bit of furniture last night, and even with that little move it felt like we made a ton of progress and the house was more and more becoming our new home.
I leave you with a photo I forgot the hubby took on Saturday of my best friend surrounded by the padding for our laminate flooring. Doesn’t she look cozy? Priceless.
I finally remembered my camera AND the memory card! So, as promised, here are some updates on our house!!
Kitchen Cabinet Hardware
I mentioned earlier in the week that we added handles to our kitchen cabinets. Look at how nice they look! Glen had a great way for installing the handles on the same spot on each cabinet. He took a piece of cardboard and cut it into an “L” shape. He then pressed the handle into the cardboard to make an indent where the holes needed to be drilled. You drill holes in your cardboard and line up your cardboard stencil the same way on each cabinet, and voila! Perfectly spaced cabinet handles! It was a neat trick that will certainly come in handy in the future.
Before:
After:
Ahhhh, so much better. Now we can actually figure out which way the cabinets open, which is especially nice since the Fannie Mae people installed some of them opening the wrong way. Oh well! Problem solved.
Basement Renovation
Now, on to the basement. I showed you a picture yesterday of the entire basement torn out. Glen finished that yesterday while Brian and I were at work. It looks huge!
The debris seems to be never-ending. Check out all of the bricks from our rounded fireplace hearth. This will be fun to remove.
Our fireplace looks a little sad now with no hearth, mantel or molding. But I know it will look so much better when this whole reno is complete. I’m going to pick out a granite hearth after work today. We are getting a black hearth will sparkly, gold flecks in it.
Glen also started ripping up the carpet in the room. Look at the lovely flooring we had underneath!
But wait, there’s more!
We have three different types of flooring in one space. I think we should leave it like that, except that we already bought new flooring last night. We also bought recessed lighting kits for my craft room, the family room and our kitchen. I can’t wait for all of the light!
Paint
So I have a confession to make. I picked out paint last night, and I’m already concerned that I picked a bad color. I bought a can of Valspar Sprinkle for my craft room and two cans of Olympic Caruso for our bedroom… I am second guessing myself though. Bad news bears.
Valspar Sprinkle - Craft Room
Olympic Caruso paint – Bedroom
So what do you think? My craft room has no windows, so I think the bright blue will be OK. But I’m less sure about the Caruso color for our bedroom. And we bought two cans… ugh. Silly hubby, I told him we should buy the $2.50 samples!
A secret room?
My last update is that we discovered we have a secret room in our house! Well, sort of. When we looked at our house we noticed a little cubby underneath our stairs that I joked was Brian’s timeout room. Well, it turns out this mini cubby is another long storage area! Glen found a hidden light in the cubby yesterday, and I was incredibly excited!
Once you get past the stair cubby, you can stand up back there (just be careful of the nails poking through at the ceiling from the floor above). Of course, I had to test it out.
Bahaha. I love our secret room! It’s so sneaky :p And the pink carpet is just oh so nice.
Tonight, Dad and the hubby are planning on dragging all of the debris out to the car port so Brian can load up a U-Haul tomorrow and take it to the dump. Meanwhile, I’ll be taping and spackling so I can paint this weekend. AND!!!! Tomorrow we get our fence. So excited to have a large cage for our crazy beast of a dog.
A Smith of All Trades 