Top 10 Ways You Know Your Renovation Is Not Yet Complete

1. You find your daughter’s sippy cup standing upright inside a ring of painter’s tape on the kitchen island.

2.  You store your cupcake pans in the oven, with bolts and screws inside the cups. Oh, and if you’re in our house, your oven has no door, because you’re still waiting on parts.

3. You no longer think it strange that you take a bath instead of a shower every morning because you still haven’t ordered the tile for the tub surround you insist you can tile yourself.

4. You don’t see a safety hazard in your toddler’s room where the outlets are not yet screwed all the way into the wall and aren’t even covered by a plate. You just see an unfinished project.

5. Toilet paper holders? What a waste of money.

6. You see your contractor more than your see your friends. In fact, at this point, your contractor probably knows you better than your friends do.

7. You don’t see what the big deal is about not having any hallway lights when you can just bring a flashlight upstairs when you need it.

8. The cardboard boxes in your house have become your toddler’s favored medium for her works in crayon.

9. You’re beginning to think primer is an acceptable wall finish.

10. When you come home from work, you no longer notice the lack of siding on your house and think at least your Typar looks better than the guy’s down the street.

I’m sure there are more. I’ll add to this post as they come to me.

Housewarming

My father, whom I call cappy, gave nick and I this clock as a housewarming gift. He built the case for it 25 years ago, and the clock hung in my grandmother’s house until she died in 2003.

We also finally got around to hanging our Matisse print. It’s starting to look like home around here!

Leveling shelving

We built a storage nook off the kitchen with the intention of someday getting some efficient shelving custom built to the space. In the meantime, we’re making do with a shelving unit from Ikea. We had some trouble getting the whole thing balanced, as you can see in the glorious shot of the level on top of a can of refried beans. But we shimmied it up with a piece of wood from the basement and filled the whole thing with some long-lost kitchen items, and now it looks downright homey. And we emptied some boxes tonight, which is major progress.

Meanwhile, our carpenter continues to trim out the windows and baseboards, and it looks great. Pictures on the way.

Blast (literally) from the past

We’re really late on posting these photos (they’re from over a month ago, before we moved in on November 1), but thought you might want to see just what we went through to get our sewer pipe running. They cut a giant hole in our street!

Coming Along Slowly

You probably can’t tell from this photo (yup, we’re still mobile blogging!) but we finally have some painted walls. Our friend’s brother, who is a professional painter, came in and banged out our cathedral ceilings, the high stairwell walls, and some other ceilings. It makes such a difference to have painted walls rather than just primed or, even worse, taped and mudded drywall. Saturday night after Sadie went to bed I painted most of the living room and half the dining area. So we are making progress, bit by bit!

I also painted the walk-in closet in our bedroom, and Nick installed closet rods so we were finally able to hang up some clothes. I still can’t find half my socks, buy at least my work clothes will be less wrinkled from now on.

Other than that, it’s catch as catch can. After a full day of work and toddler minding afterwards, I don’t have a ton of energy for projects. It really doesn’t help that it’s been dark for hours by the time I get a breather–but we will get this place in shape soon enough. Stay tuned!

Blue Kitchen

We’ve started paining the house white–Atrium White, by Benjamin Moore–and we’re pleased with the way the color looks in the living room and on the hallway walls (pictuers tk). But this weekend we decided our kitchen needed some color. A pale, bluish-gray, to be exact. I found this color, Silver Gray, today, via Remodelista:

Benjamin Moore Silver Gray

Described as “… a beautiful pale gray just tingeing on blue,” the original posting is at House Beautiful, here.

Mass Confusion and a Rusty Nail

This morning we had two painters and our carpenter at the house. The painters are here to tackle the high cathedral ceiling. It will be nice not to look at drywall mud anymore.

Not sure if you can see the color samples below that I painted on our kitchen wall. There are three squares of white paint, from left to right, Atrium White, Dove White, and Decorator’s White, all by Benjamin Moore. We decided to use Atrium White for our walls (a warm white with pinkish undertones) and Decorator’s for the ceiling. I’d read that many standard white ceiling paints can tend to have a grayish cast to them. Since the cathedral ceiling is such a major element of the upstairs architecture, I wanted to be sure it was a clean white, so we went with Decorator’s. Though initially we planned on using it on the walls as well, we found it to be a little too cool as a wall paint.

I think the painters are having a hard time painting around all our stuff. But we’ll be happy with whatever they can get done today–I think it would be really hard for us to get up on ladders to reach those tall ceilings and walls.

In other news, our carpenter stepped on a rusty nail on the deck, where he is cutting wood for the trim. The nail went right through his shoe and about two inches deep into his foot.  Apparently he is allergic to tetanus shots, and therefore has not had one. Nick found the hydrogen peroxide and had him wash out the wound. Though he was debating whether or not to have it looked at, we insisted he go to Brighton First Care for an evaluation. Puncture wounds are not to be trifled with!

Luckily, Ben, our contractor, has workman’s comp insurance. I guess that’s just one more reason to hire a general contractor.

All the Trimmings

I can’t believe I actually thought we could do this ourselves. Reid got out the router and the table saw and built the trim around one of Sadies windows today and it looks GORG-eous. We are thrilled with the results and can’t wait for the whole house to be trimmed out.

A window without trim. Sad.

Another Brick in the Wall

Another task completed: Reid installed our glass blocks to make a window for the half-bath. The little space is completely dark, with no windows at all, so now it will get some light from the kitchen, which will save us from having to turn the light on every time we go in there.

In other news, we decided today to bite the bullet and have Ben’s crew finish all the trim. I thought we could potentially save some money by doing it ourseleves. But I’m beginning to realize that will probably never happen. Plus, we want the trim to look good, not like some hack job (which it probably would if we were wielding the table saw). It will take about two weeks and will really be the last thing the house needs before we get to the fun part of decorating.

One Day at a Time

Nick and I are putting a couple of hours each day into unpacking/setting up/organizing/fixing. And that’s on days we work at our jobs. On Nicks last day off, he spent about 14 hours straight doing…stuff. He wired every outlet in the house, sanded our butcher block island, fixed a leak in the washing machine, collaborated with contractors and made numerous trips to Lowes. There is just so much to do. I admit I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed and I kind of just want to get into bed and read my chick-lit novel to escape it all. I’m usually much more of a doer but right now I feel like burying my head in the sand and hoping it just all gets done.

Here are some things we have gotten done over the last few days:

-Put our bed together (no more sleeping on mattress on the floor!)
-installed outlets, and as a result were finally able to take the construction lights down (a major milestone)
-purchased two electric hot plates to sub in for our sad sack stove and made a full meal (sausage with marinara and pasta, from colluci’s on the hill, yum)
-assembled the couch
-did lots of vacuuming and wiping down of …stuff

Our contractor accomplished the following:
-installed, mudded and taped the cement backer board in the tub surround
-fitted two really old doors we saved from the reno onto our new downstairs closet

A big part of the stress is our lack of storage. And all of our stuff. Maybe I’ll try an experiment: I’ll post photos of “stuff” and ask you guys whether it’s worth keeping or not. It’ll be like wiki-clutter control, a collaborative effort.

Still mobile blogging for now, so pardon the lack of photos and the typos.