Burnout!

We're moving into our house on Tuesday (postponed from Saturday because the countertop guys are still not ready to install…in fact, I think we'll be living there for a few days with no countertop, and worse, no kitchen sink. (I just remembered that a huge percentage of the world's population doesn't have access to clean water and I'm complaining about a few days of washing dishes on the deck. Sorry.)

We are burned out! Every project feels impossible so we keep delaying. Latest thing: we don't have interior doors on most of the rooms yet because we didn't realize how dumb it is to buy door slabs instead of pre hung. Mortising hinges?! What the heck?! Hopefully later this week.

Here are some things that did happen.

The rest of the floors are in!

Carpet installed in the bedrooms!

Bathrooms grouted and sealed! Toilets purchased!

Somehow, we're going to make it.

Tile Hero

Originally, we had planned to do white hex tiles on the bathroom floor, inspired by, of all places, our grad school apartment bathroom. It was all-white (hex on the floor, square gloss tiles in the shower) and we loved it!  My wise father-in-law, however, advised against doing mosaic tiles since 1) it's our first-ever tiling job, and 2) we don't have 5 years to grout (right, Kar? :-)

Then I wanted a shiny carrara marble-like floor, but a stranger in Home Depot took his earbuds out to strike up a conversation about how slick my bathroom would be if I bought that tile. Right.

Finally, we chose avila gris tiles (from Spain! Viva Espana!) They got perfect reviews, and while they're darker than I wanted, I love them.

Our friend Aaron, who used to be a professional tile layer, generously came over and spent ALL DAY tiling our bathrooms. We are so, so indebted to all of the people who have helped us on our house. 

Aaron in action. He did an amazing job. Unfortunately, Peter stepped into the bathroom, so a tile or two got pushed down a tiny bit.  This is a bummer, but considering that all of the tiles would have been that way if we had done it ourselves, we're going with it. 

Floors, Continued

This week was spent almost entirely on installing the laminate floor, and there is still a little ways to go (we did a few side projects--paint touch-ups, installing a couple of new door frames, and a whole day of tiling bathroom. Mostly just laminate floors, though!) 

We couldn't believe how slow-going it was. If it had been just one big square room, that would have been fine, but the flooring goes in and out of lots of little closets, winds around the bedroom hall, and goes under the fridge, dishwasher, and range. Jonathan has done about a hundred cuts of various kinds and has a few more to go. 

Several kind friends have come by to put in hours on the floor, a few who have lots of experience. It was heartening for Jonathan to find that they didn't go any faster than he did. 

The other night Jonathan was staring at how the bottom of his cup fit against the side of the scalloped plate that he was eating from and he said, "If I cut that just a little bit more, it will fit…" Poor guy. This is what he dreams of at night:

But it's nice to remember that this

Became this

Became this!  We're not super into the swirly-ness of this wood, but the color is warm and nice and it's not as swirly in person. Also, it will have a lot of stuff on it at this time next week!

Floors

Our guiding principles for the house, in order, are
1) Don't over-improve
2) Make it resell-able

3) Do what you love

For the floor, we wanted wood-look. Hardwood was expensive and the least kid-friendly. For the kind we could afford, we'd might have to refinish to sell. Engineered hardwood is great looking and doesn't have as many shrink/swell issues as wood, but since the surface is wood, it gets scratched easily, too. We heard lots of horror stories about laminate, but it was firmly in our price range and the samples were way harder to scratch than wood/engineered hardwood. We figured we could replace our whole laminate floor for what it would cost to refinish the wood.

We found got a sample of laminate that we loved. It was a warm, dark wood with lots of rustic character and a perfectly realistic texture. In the weeks between when we chose it and when we ordered it, though, I got more and more worried that it was going to warp when someone spilled on it. It came down to the wire--I had to order or else the wood wouldn't be ready to be picked up when I went to Chicago to get Kahlin from the airport.

I dialed the BuildDirect number (love those guys, by the way) and had a moment of clarity: wouldn't it be great to have an inexpensive floor that still looked good when you go to sell?? That's the best of both worlds! So on the spot I decided order a sight-unseen kind of laminate with good reviews that claimed to have waterproofed joints.   

I picked it up at a trucking warehouse in Chicago (saved $300 of shipping). I was the only small car there. It was very intimidating to back into bay with all of the tractor trailers. Our van looked hilarious there.

You can see a little tiny pallet of Bowman flooring on the loading dock! 

So how do we like the floor? It's fine! It's nothing like our favorite one (the part that we like the least is that it has no surface texture), but it is unoffensive and I am happy. The waterproofing looks great! Mike from our ward (also the father of Jonathan's piano students) came over to lend a hand with the first few rows. Getting excited to see the finished product!

Have a Seat

We've been in between kitchen tables for a year now. We outgrew our fun red one but never found a good replacement, so we've been using our falling-apart chrome chairs with a bashed up wood table that we meant to refinish (but winter came). No fun. I've been worrying that the chrome chairs will scratch up our new floor (we haven't been able to find pads that will work with them), but we don't have the time or money to look for/buy (or build! kira? are you reading this?) new table/chairs right now.

We have an awesome vintage furniture store in town that Scott loves because the rooms are connected by ramps. We often visited on school mornings when we were looking for an outing.

A few months ago I saw a set of five 1959 chairs that I loved at first sight & sit. They were adorable and in great shape--super solid and ridiculously comfortable for a kitchen chair. I came very close to buying them, but 1) they were $250 for the set, and 2) We are really looking for 6 chairs, and 3) I wasn't sure they would suit our new space or unknown new table. BUT yesterday I was driving by and four of the chairs were outside selling for $100! Hooray! The chairs are mine!! They even make our ugly table look nice enough to keep on until we're in a better position to figure things out. 

I Just Need to Vent

From the first time that we walked through this house, we assumed that we would have to pay to have all of the gunk blown out of the HVAC system. There were fan-shaped soot marks above the vents.

Having the HVAC cleaned is kind of a depressing home upgrade--expensive and not clearly noticeable. On the other hand, the guys gave us our money's worth. They were there for a day and a half, and their set-up was amazing. 

They had things that they threaded through the vents to agitate the soot, then they covered all of the vents with cardboard things and blew and sucked everything out.

Looking forward to flipping on the AC one of these days!

Cabinets

We have a cabinet factory store 30 minutes from us, and we almost bought a set of returned cabinets back in March for $1500 (!), but it had a couple of very funky things (like a corner sink base), so we decided against it at the last minute.

Both Costco and Home Depot offer built-to-order cabinets from a company called AllWood Cabinets. I had learned a lot from the factory store guys and felt fairly confident that I could figure out what to order to make a good U-layout (our kitchen is small and not very complicated) (I should mention that I still spent hours and hours stressing over all of the details and decision). It's by far our biggest single expense, but I'm really glad we didn't A) try to keep our original cabinets, and B) didn't do those weird ones.  

The UPS Freight guy dropped of the cabinets in our driveway and stood around while Kahlin and Jonathan madly tried to check for shipping damage.

Unfortunately, UPS had bashed in the back of our three-drawer base cabinet, which sent me into hysterics because the counter-top measuring guys were due on Wednesday, and all of the cabinets were supposed to be installed by then…and a replacement cabinet wouldn't be available for three weeks (and we are supposed to move in in less than three weeks). AHHH!

In any case, we went ahead with the installation. Because we have no idea what we are doing in a general sense, I texted our faithful realtor to ask her if she and her husband usually get professionals to install cabinets in their flip houses or whether they do them personally. She texted back and said, "Kirk says it's super easy! He can be there Monday." So Kirk showed up, and in Jonathan & Kahlin's words, had installed the first cabinet before they turned around. We love this guy.

When he saw the drawer base he said, "Well, you could get a replacement, but this damage will not affect this base in any way, and the back of it is going to be covered." Then he threw in three screws, which somehow made it look perfectly fine, and installed it. Woohoo!

Ta-da! There is so much left to be done, and it sort of drives me crazy that we won't be replacing the stove for a few more months, but I'm really pleased by the layout and we are making progress!! The above-fridge cabinet was also damaged, and they are sending a replacement for it.

Prime Time & Paint Time

Priming with Kiltz oil-based primer--we're glad we did it, but…belch! Horrible to clean off of rollers and brushes and smells like the devil. I'm pretty sure it did it's job, though, because who could possibly smell cigarette smoke through the smell of the primer?? 

Priming took about four solid days, I think. We had some great helpers.

We had forgotten to paint the bathroom closet, so we found someone who was the perfect size!

Kahlin had a great idea to put one of the shelves back in for Peter to sit on, and that worked perfectly. 

After priming we started to PAINT! It was a lot more pleasant in just about every way, although it took about a week to paint our whole house including ceilings and woodwork (we're doing replacement windows in the fall, but we painted the moulding). The ceilings were the hardest part--we used Behr ceiling paint, which somehow didn't have the greatest coverage, so even after two coats there were some areas that needed work. 

I really like all of the paint colors, especially "gray horse" in our bedroom. for the hall bathroom we did an impromptu mix of "moonshine" and "palest pistachio" that I like a lot.

Some sweet romantic guy was painting in the living room

This is the correct spot for a great "after" picture, but this is the only after that I have :-)

The End of Plaster, the Beginning of Primer

Well, this doesn't have anything to do with plaster or primer, but this picture is to represent the many, many projects that my father-in-law finished during his final two days with us (while he had the flu). He installed cement board (ready for tile) in both bathrooms, fixed the crawlspace window, put the second layer of subfloor in the entryway, did the plaster finishwork on the living room window, installed new plumbing things (the names of which I don't know...), took the actual fan part of the whole house fan out, fixed our fence....the list goes on. But here at least is the cement board:  

And his wife was equally helpful. In this picture she is directly under where the huge, unsightly 3'x3' whole house fan vent used to be. Now, miraculously, it is seamlessly smooth ceiling. This is thanks to her work, Jonathan's work, and some quick finish-work by our kind stake president, who just dropped by out of the goodness of his heart (and maybe to check up on how we were treating his drywall tools :-)

With the dusty work done, we have started to prime. In a normal situation, my corner-cutting nature would have dictated using a combination paint/primer, but we need to seal in the smoke smell and stains, so we are using Kiltz Original oil based primer, which is the real deal.

So far we have done most of the two biggest rooms (living room & master bed/bath)! Yesterday we jumped in and primed the fireplace because it looked more fun than just priming walls.

Cleaning the brick! (not sure how long this lasted...Jonathan took the picture)

Yeah, yeah...this is a controversial picture for several reasons. What?! Are you just going to paint over your paneling? Yes. We are. Two reasons: our realtor/home flipping friend said that it won't effect resale value at all (at least here), and 2) It's quick.  I don't mind the look as long as the paint job is nice. We are probably going to put shelves on this wall anyway. Another controversy: painting brick. Yep, we just...did. I read a lot of tutorials and also a lot of people saying that they don't like the look, but I vastly prefer it to the brown brick, and we're not interested in framing it out.  After we finished this wall  the room looked a LOT smaller! The dark wall really stretched out the room. We're interested to see what the paint does for it.

Paint Purchased!

This week Home Depot was having a big rebate on Behr paint, so we hurried to choose our colors and buy what we needed.  Though our house is small, it was still a little stressful to buy paint for the whole house at the same time. We knew we wanted the common areas and halls to be a crisp light gray...we like the look, and it has definitely been the standard house neutral for a while now (and we're trying to keep things pretty standard).

Choosing a gray turned out to be just as complicated as the lady in the Benjamin Moore youtube video said it would be (i.e. all the shades we thought were going to look great looked CRAZY on the walls...either light blue, purple, or brown...and almost everything was darker than we wanted).

I went online and started looking at paint colors on various blogs. Based on what looked interesting, we got Home Depot to color-match paint samples to various Benjamin Moore colors (no Benjamin Moore store anywhere near here).  We liked some, we hated others, BUT...we were able to choose all of our colors and move on.

This is not going to be very illuminating (as we found out, swatches never look like the actual color on the wall), but here's what we bought for most of the house:



Maybe I just couldn't resist the name "breath of fresh air"...that's what we chose for the boys room, partly based on a blogger who had it for the backdrop of tons of bright colors that I loved. It is very fresh and sky-like on the wall.

You can't even tell it's a color on the swatch, but in real life, it's great! For Juju/piano room:

Our room:

No More Sinking Feeling

Our sink cabinet base is 33 inches. It's the only size that works in the kitchen without filling it full of 9 inch cabinets. I didn't think too much about it until I started looking for kitchen sinks. We have ordered regular formica counters (which could be the subject of a whole other post; basically, it's not worth it to us to do stone countertops since we are trying not to over-improve), so we need a drop-in. A standard sink is apparently 33 inches, which is too large for a 33 inch base. The next size of down for drop-ins is pretty much 27 inches. What?? I can't be the only person in the world that need a sink to fit a 33 inch sink base.

When I finally did find a 31 inch double sink, each side was strangely small, so I started looking for a single sink. No dice. Then I saw this 31 incher on amazon:

While a small side sink doesn't seem too useful, I ordered it based on the fact that the main part of the sink looked big, and the sink as a whole was a lot wider than 27".

In person, the sink was even bigger than I expected! I think it's going to work out great. I even like the side sink.