It’s been a long time since we’ve posted, but I promise we’ve been hard at work on the house! I’ll run through some of the things we’re up to:
Our floors are holding up nicely, and the past couple of weeks we’ve finally gotten around to installing the quarter round trim around the edges. First, we had to buy it and load it into the car:
We also picked up some pine boards for covering our column with, and the stair casing. We sanded these pieces down and then painted them with 2 coats of our semi-gloss trim paint:
We thought we had enough (13 pieces) but ended up having to go back to get 3 more…which then had to be sanded and painted. Not efficient, but they’re done!
To install these, we used the borrowed nail gun/air compressor, and the miter saw to cut the 45 degree angles properly. When we needed a seam in a long wall, we also angled the cut to hide the seam better:
One of the first things we noticed with the first piece is it was sticking to the floor so when you walked across the floor, it made sticking/creaking sounds. Not good. We tried lathering the trim and floor with baby powder to make it less tacky, but Nik finally started using a thin piece of paperboard to give a small gap between the floor and the trim which greatly improved the sound and still looked great.
So most of our downstairs is done, except the pieces that will join with the kitchen pieces, since the flooring isn’t down in the kitchen yet. Next step is filling all the holes with wood filler or Spackle, sanding that, caulking any larger gaps, and painting over those spots. It never ends…
I’ve slowly been thinking about window treatments, and I’ve got some sheers hung in the dining room, most likely with some more colorful curtains to follow that we obtained from a friend who was getting rid of curtains:
We have a bunch of curtain rods for the living room but they’re awful brass. But they’re still perfectly good otherwise (and curtain rods aren’t cheap!), so I’m spray painting 4 sets for about $14 of paint in a dark grayish color for when we put curtains in there:
My mom and dad visited this past weekend, and also helped wash our windows which look so much better now:
A while back, Nik installed some new doorknobs in satin nickel (much better than brass!) and we got the KwikSet smart key locks, so we could rekey them ourselves. The doorknobs cost probably about $125 for 4 doors, which is cheaper than rekeying them anyway.
And one more BIG improvement to tell you about…the jungle gym is no more! Last weekend we cleaned up and mowed our backyard and finally all the brush was gone:
And then this weekend, when my mom and I were out wedding dress shopping Nik and my dad ripped out the playset!
There’s so much room back there now, and we actually have a yard. There are some new patches of dirt that we’re trying to reseed. We bought some seed and started a test patch to see if it will grow in the clay, and if this is successful we’ll probably put more down on our whole backyard since it’s all a bit rough looking currently.
My dad also helped sand down the drywall around the stair opening and that’s looking a lot better. I think its about ready for primer and paint, whenever we get around to that. And there is one more fun project we’re working on (I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it) in the master closet. One side collapsed about a week after we moved in:
It was a disaster. But then we realized our closet is so much more functional without shelving on both sides since it’s not quite big enough for that. We got creative with some of the pallet wood our flooring arrived on, and we’re building a wall of hooks…but it’s almost done so I’ll save that for next post!
Ok, I think I’m done. I’ll leave you with a picture of this cool little salamander we found in the backyard while raking leaves:
rePhurbisheD 