This project is starting to speak to me. I have to be honest. I was a little overwhelmed and even a little skeptical when we first got this thing started. Tearing out the old stuff was fun, but looking at it after the tear down was scary. "Can we really bring this thing back to life?" Or more accurately..."what makes us think we have the skills to bring this thing back to life?" I looked at the scale and enormity of what needed to be done and felt daunted by the task.
But, each week as we complete our little projects they are starting to add up. Each week we get little glimpses of what the end result will be. This is where it gets exciting for me.
I came in with some sketches, some pictures from websites, some ideas in my head, and now we are starting to see the design take place in real life. It's pretty exciting!
Monday morning we got a good early start. Monday was a great day! I was able to talk to my missionary son who is serving in Africa! He gets to Skype home twice a year and one of those special times is Mother's Day. It was so great to talk to him, but we ended up skyping at 3am until about 4am. We needed to squeeze it in at a time when the Internet cafes were open in Ghana, before seminary started for Bill and I and before Ethan was gone to school for the day...so 3am fit the bill. I was afraid that we would be too tired to go work at the house after such an early start to our day, but I think Andy's call energized us!
We got right to work with flooring in the great room. I love how easy this flooring is to install! It's kind of like putting together legos, but legos that require a miter saw :). But still...easy compared to most other jobs we've done. It's also a pretty gratifying job to see an ugly sub-floor be transformed into something beautiful.
We also finished up the tile work we started last week in the laundry room and on the fireplace. I love it! I chose a dark charcoal color with gray grout. My house now has travertine with beige grout and I'm just tired of looking at travertine that is becoming worn with overuse and beige grout that looks closer to gray as it is in the highest traffic area in the house! So, having this in my mind, I chose a tile that will stand up to the traffic and a grout that won't show the dirt. But...it's also beautiful. I love how the dark color will tie in with other elements of the house, like our big iron front door.
The other design trick I wanted to capture was to make the fireplace itself look bigger. I purposefully chose the charcoal color tile on the fireplace to trick your eye into thinking the fireplace itself was bigger. Hope it works.
One afternoon, as we were getting a little discouraged and super tired, Bill and I decided to try and find a job that was low effort, high impact. We chose to put up the chandelier in the master bedroom. It really was fairly easy to do....except for one slightly dangerous element. Electricity. We thought we had the right fuse turned off in the breaker box, but found out quickly (when Bill touched something with his wire cutters, sparks flew and the wire cutters also went flying) that it wasn't the right circuit. Oops. Glad there was minimal damage...just a few years off my life out of fright.
Anyway...it's went up and here is the result. Beautiful!
The other big event of the week was our hired help!! We were able to find two young men who were in need of some part time work. Carson Oliver and Kyler Poage. We have had them helping us out each afternoon from about 3:30-5:30. It has been a huge amount of help!!
Having 6 extra hands (Ethan, of course, comes after school and helps out, too) for just 2 hours a day makes a huge difference! We have had them mostly working outside. They have beee able to get all the small stumps out of the ground and even got one of the huge ones out on Saturday! It was so heavy it took all three big guys, a chain, a chainsaw and a truck to get it out of there. We only have two more big ones 😉
We have also had them mowing lawns, edging, moving wood, cleaning out the garage and other odd jobs that all have to get done. It has been a huge help and both boys are great workers and have positive attitudes. We love it!
The last job Bill and I started this week was the office space. Originally we thought we would leave it for a while, thinking it wasn't a necessity to us moving in the house, but after getting started with the flooring and seeing how it fits together we decided that doing all the wood flooring now would be our best bet. That meant getting the office ready for flooring.
Here is what we have accomplished so far....
We put paneling on the walls first, and then gave everything a first coat of paint. Next we had to temporarily put in the base boards, crown moulding and some of the ceiling pieces to make sure we fit the batten in correctly. Then we took a big sheet of mdf and cut it into 2 1/4 inch strips. Then we are creating a rectangular pattern on the walls using the batten we cut. Next we will take down the base, crown and ceiling and give the walls two more coats of paint. Then we can start putting in the ceiling. We are using reclaimed wood. Hopefully we will have completed pictures of that by next week.
It's been another week with lots of fun results! We are moving closer and closer every day to the move in day! Wish us luck.