One year (plus)

It occurred to me that one year has passed since I started writing about our house and our journey into renovation land. I thought it would be fun to mark the occasion by listing the accomplishments we (and our contractor and his crew, mostly) have made in the past year.

1. New HVAC system installed for the first floor, plus duct work in place for the second and third floors unit.
2. New electrical system for the first and second floors (now I’ll be able to use the hair dryer and not worry about breaking a circuit every time).
3. New plumbing systems for the first and second floors.
4. A completely gutted and renovated first floor.
5. New siding on the addition.
6. A new kitchen that pretty much had to be rebuilt from the ground up.
7. A new half bath.
8. A new laundry room.
9. A new full bathroom that two people can fit in comfortably at the same time (no more fighting over who gets the sink – we each get our own!).
10. A demo’ed bathroom that fills me with glee every time I walk by it.
11. About half of the windows replaced.
12. Many new light fixtures that were surprisingly exhausting to pick out.
13. The most beautiful refinished floors I’ve ever seen. So beautiful that they make me want to never leave this house. I would hug them if I could.
14. A marriage that’s still intact.

I love lamp

Still working on finishing the bedroom, still living with Michael's parents. Our contractor has finished all the work he needed to do with the new windows and door; now we're just patching up any holes and filling in any cracks before we can finally paint that last wall. Our contractor would've been completely done, but we need to replace two cabinets in the kitchen that were damaged from the pipes that froze. Thankfully, that's all that needs to be repaired, and we're not close to being ready to paint the kitchen anyway.

I bought table lamps for our bedroom:

We don't have bedside tables to put them on yet, but we will have lamps. Restoration Hardware had them on sale at a ridiculous discount; I just couldn't pass it up. That's it for now!

The bane of my existence is gone

Not as much painting going on lately, though I primed most of the new bathroom yesterday all by myself, including the ceiling. Painting ceilings sucks. The human neck was not meant to bend in certain ways. At least the ceilings on the first floor aren't as high.

Other projects we're working on are fixing up the bedroom windows and the mantle as we wait for the new window/door installation to be completed. Michael started replacing the frame on one of the windows so that it will match the other, a project someone else started a long time ago and never finished. Shocking, I know, that a project was started and not completed in this house. One window as the rosettes and fluting, the other has just the fluting along the top. I was pretty nervous about him tackling this project, because it would turn out either really awesome, or we would end up begging our contractor to fix it. What he did was take one side of one of the old door frames (we've got several of them), which also has the rosettes in the upper corners and fluting along the top and down the sides, and cut it to the same size as the window frame, since the old door frame is the same width as the window frame. It fortunately was a success; now he just has to do the same for the other side of the window. It's not perfect, but with a little spackle and sanding and a fresh coat of paint, it'll look great.

The mantle is almost ready to be painted. The fireplace was covered over, and since we don't have the money to open it back up and get it working again, we're leaving it that way. But it still needs some work before we paint it. We bought a flue stopper for the big hole in the fireplace. We're just waiting for...whatever he used to hold this piece in place to set before putting the stopper in. (Michael, of course, is not awake yet, so I can't bug him about what all this stuff is called. I'm pretty sure "fireplace thingy" is not the correct term.)

Elsewhere, Michael has torn up the old bathroom, where the pipes froze a few weeks ago. I managed to get a few pictures of it before it was completely demo'ed.

Of all of the things in this house, this bathroom was the part I hated the most. First of all, it didn't have a real door on it (something I neglected to get a picture of). It looked like someone installed a bathroom in a closet, and thought leaving the closet door was a good idea. It was one of those sliding/folding doors. With no doorknob. And no lock. Do you have any idea how frustrating this was for a girl? No privacy whatsoever. This was especially frustrating when the construction was going on and a whole crew of men were around. I wasn't there that often when they were working, but if I was and needed to use the bathroom, it would almost reduce me to tears.

Second, there was no ventilation. Third, there was no insulation, so in the winter, it got pretty cold. A space heater solved that problem, but somebody didn't like it running all night. Maybe if this person was the first one up in the mornings and actually went in there when it was cold and had to sit down on the freezing cold toilet seat, he would've thought differently. Fourth, the walls were the ugliest shade of yellow. It was like mustard, and I hate mustard. Fifth, no tub, just a shower stall. A pain in the neck to clean, and you can't take a bath, which is nice every once and a while. Sixth, it was filthy, and no amount of cleaning ever got it up to my standards of clean. Seventh, there was a window that some fool thought was a good idea to cover up.

And surprise! There were about four or five layers of flooring in there.

The floors are gone; the toilet, sink, and shower are gone; and the window's exposed along with some brick. Like downstairs, this brick wall was once the back wall of the house; this bathroom is part of the addition. So, where the window is where the shower stall used to be; the mirror and sink used be to the left of the window.

I think we're going to put in another full bath in here eventually, since we've got the plumbing in place, but we'll rearrange where everything goes. We'd also like to keep the brick exposed, but paint it white. We're all about the exposed brick in this house.