Home Improvement

A whirlwind weekend

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!

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Home Improvement

Ubatuba granite and clamshell molding

Our granite is finally finished! It took an extra week for the place we ordered from to get us our 5-foot piece of granite cut and polished. Since I picked from a warehouse of remnants, it was a little tough to see the exact color I was picking. The color I chose was called UbaTuba, which looked completely black with a few gold specs in it. Our granite has a little more green in it than I was anticipating, but I think it’s going to look really nice as our hearth. It weighs about 130 lbs. Wowzer.

In other home improvement news, the hubby and I finally ordered blinds! ** Hallelujah** Privacy is going to be nice. We used JustBlinds.com, so we measure, they create, we install. It cost a little less than $500 to do the entire first floor of windows, minus our bay window. We’re not sure what we want to do with that one yet.

Our blind order included a set for our master bathroom, but not for the window in our guest bathroom shower. Instead we used a window film to add a frosted effect to the glass. Now you can’t see into the window and there aren’t bulky blinds in the way of your showering.

This is the film we bought at  Home Depot for $19.99.

We bought the application kit as well for another $9.

The film was easy to install on the window. It took us about 10 minutes to do both panes. And we have a ton of it left, too. I am toying with the idea of using this film in our downstairs bathroom as well.

Before:

After:

And you don’t really notice it from the outside, which is nice.

This was the perfect solution for this window, fo sho.

My last exciting piece of new is that Glen surprised us by removing the molding in the family room (that wasn’t the surprise) and using it to fix some busted molding in our kitchen. Our whole house has clamshell molding, but in our pass-through window into the kitchen and around the door frame of the kitchen, the molding was messed up or different from the rest of the house. Glen removed the downstairs molding without breaking it and reframed out the doorway of our kitchen, the baseboard and the pass-through window. Now all of our trim matches! He is awesome.